Paperboy<\/em> centers around a cleverly unnamed protagonist (it\u2019s too difficult for him to pronounce), an eleven-year-old boy living in the suburbs of Memphis in 1959. After taking over a paper route for a vacationing friend over the summer, he\u2019s forced into uncomfortable interactions with his customers while dealing with the violent local junkman.<\/p>\nThe book reads in a straightforward and sparse style, as it\u2019s told through the protagonist on his typewriter. This spares the reader from a lot of stuttering clich\u00e9s such as looking constantly nervous or jokes about all the \u201cwacky\u201d mishaps when talking to a stutterer. Nor do you have to read through lines of repeated letters a la Porky Pig. The narrator has a much more realistic stutter that comes in a mixture of blocks during certain sounds and repeated phrases. There\u2019s also the interesting historical aspect of early techniques in speech therapy. Thirty years after the events of The King\u2019s Speech, <\/em>the protagonist sees a therapist who teaches Gentle Air, slowly exhaling on words he can\u2019t say. This will later turn into Easy Onsets, what I was learning in the early 2000s, where a deep breath is taken before every phrase as a precaution to any stuttering that might come ahead. Author Vince Vawter is a lifelong stutterer himself, and many aspects seem to be taken from his own childhood in Memphis, giving it a very sincere and authentic feel. If you want a child to get an empathetic and realistic look on the life of a stutterer, this will get the job done.<\/p>\nThe writing itself, while plainspoken and down to earth, is nothing special. At times the book seems to be juggling too many plot points at once, with a violent third act that seems to come out of nowhere. Another setback is the narrator\u2019s background. The kid\u2019s family is loaded, especially by 1950s standards. \u00a0His father is mentioned owning a plane while the mother seems to not work at all. This explains how the family can afford a private speech therapist, something that wasn\u2019t too common at the time. The boy is mainly cared for by Mam, a black nanny who is his closest companion. It\u2019s an odd take on Jim Crow era south, where black garbage collectors can apparently walk through upscale white neighborhoods without a fuss and the only violence we see aimed at black characters is caused by other black people. The character of Mam herself veers dangerously into stereotype territory. Living in a garage behind the house of the protagonist, her life seems to revolve around serving the white family she works for and being a surrogate mother to their son. Any ties to the black community are full of tragedy and violence. Sort of like The Help<\/em> but for prepubescent boys.<\/p>\nThe book also suffers from an overload of characters and subplots, most them regarding the various newspaper customers, including an alcoholic housewife and an eccentric intellectual whose then innocent actions (inviting an eleven-year-old he barely knows into his house) would firmly place him into the \u201cstranger danger\u201d category today. Named Mr. Spiro, this character gives an odd mixture of advice to help the protagonist\u2019s speech, some of it sincere and some of it so awkward it comes across as clueless and condescending.<\/p>\n
After finishing Paperboy<\/em> I wondered how I would have reacted to it if I had read it around the same time as the Chicken Soup<\/em> fiasco. I\u2019m a sucker for historical fiction and this would have been right up my alley as a ten-year-old. I would have probably gotten through the first couple of chapters, gotten too uncomfortable at the similarities, then switched back to the Dear America <\/em>series or whatever Jerry Spinelli was putting out at the time.<\/p>\nThe one thing that\u2019s really missing in most children\u2019s disability books is a sense of pride. You get some of that at the end of Paperboy<\/em> when the protagonist finally says his name proudly on the first day of school and says that he stutters, but it takes two hundred pages to get to that point. And he still tells Mam on the final page, \u201cMy soul doesn\u2019t stutter.\u201d Maybe souls don\u2019t stutter, but stuttering is still an identity, it\u2019s still a huge impact on anyone\u2019s life. Whether the impact is good or bad is up to the individual to decide.<\/p>\nPaperboy<\/em> is only one character\u2019s experience of stuttering, but it\u2019s an honest one. And in a world where so often these stories aren\u2019t told, that comes across like a breath of fresh air.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paperboy<\/em> is only one character\u2019s experience of stuttering, but it\u2019s an honest one. And in a world where so often these stories aren\u2019t told, that comes across like a breath of fresh air.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":1270,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_generate-full-width-content":"","kt_blocks_editor_width":""},"categories":[62,522],"tags":[160],"genre":[23],"age_category":[6],"disability":[161],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1269"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7278,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269\/revisions\/7278"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1269"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=1269"},{"taxonomy":"age_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/age_category?post=1269"},{"taxonomy":"disability","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disability?post=1269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a><\/center><\/div>So it\u2019s important to have books like Paperboy<\/em>, warts and all. Paperboy<\/em> centers around a cleverly unnamed protagonist (it\u2019s too difficult for him to pronounce), an eleven-year-old boy living in the suburbs of Memphis in 1959. After taking over a paper route for a vacationing friend over the summer, he\u2019s forced into uncomfortable interactions with his customers while dealing with the violent local junkman.<\/p>\n