Yuffie's Book Reviews

Everybody Sees the Ants - by A.S. King

--Published Book--

EStA is a book about a 15-year-old loner kid named Lucky who gets bullied by this evil prick named Nader. Lucky goes to adults for help with Nader, but Nader's dad is a lawsuit-happy prick who threatened to sue the school board the next time his son gets "wrongly" suspended (Nader stabbed Lucky's arm with a pencil). So basically Lucky is on his own with no friends and a ton of teenage angst. Not going to lie, it took me about 60ish pages to fully get immersed in this book because of all the stereotypical teenage angst and lackluster accounts of how much his life sucks. But soon I got so immersed that I forgot I was reading words sometimes. I felt like I was experiencing things as Lucky was, and it was phenomenal.

The plot was really quiet, nothing too jaw-dropping or heart-in-your-throat type of things. When he gets his cheek smashed into the ground and badly scraped by Nader, Lucky's mom (who was also experiencing marital problems with her husband, who is really quiet and only cares about food and basically ignores all other problems ever) decides to pack up and visit her brother and (pill-popping, obese, and crazy) sister-in-law in Arizona for a few weeks to take a break. She takes Lucky with her so he can escape Nader for a little while too.

So the rest of the book just calmly goes through Lucky's experiences with his really annoying aunt (who is convinced he's depressed and tries to slip him Prozac until Lucky's mom yells at her), and his uncle who teaches him to lift weights and work out and kind of acts like his first true friend.

Like I said, it's a very quiet plot with nothing too big happening. The one selling point for the plot is Lucky's dreams/daydreams about the grandfather he never met who was a prisoner of war in the Vietnam War and was never found or brought home. So Lucky has these really vivid dreams where he visits his granddad and tries to help him escape. Again, not much action. Mostly they're just sitting in trees and talking or playing cards. Every dream features his granddad with one less limb--a missing leg at first, then both his feet, then an arm, etc. Lucky is very buff and manly in these dreams.

Lucky's using them as an escape from the real world, of course, but there's a bit of intrigue in that when he wakes up, he's holding something from the dream. If his granddad gave him a cigar, he wakes up holding one. There was one dream where the room overflowed with Chiquita bananas, and he woke up with the stickers on his forehead. It never gets explained in the book, so sometimes you might wonder if he really was with his Granddad, if he was crazy and hallucinating all these objects when he woke up, or something else.

There was definitely a plot twist reveal that completely blew my mind and made me pause and stared, wide-eyed, at the book for a few moments before I could bring myself to move on. So for that, the book gets major points.

The best part of this story was the characters. Everyone, protagonist, side characters, and all were soooo phenomenally characterized. For example, Lucky's mom was obsessed with swimming. Every day she'd go to the pool and swim laps, even if it was raining or whatever. Lucky commented how she was a squid. His dad was a turtle who hid in his shell whenever there was a problem (i.e. Nader bullying his son. the dad just said to ignore it, which obviously didn't work). But see, his dad never new his father (the POW granddad), so he doesn't know how to be a father to Lucky. And the dad also is so obsessed with POW/MIA stuff that he has a freaking flag in their yard he rises and takes down every day, and he and Lucky have like a million POW/MIA shirts and patches and just about everything. But they never talk about granddad. Ever.

I'm doing a hugely terrible job explaining all the layers in these characters. I just barely scratched the surface with that^. I've never seen such a fleshed-out cast before. Usually in books, one character is more fleshed out than others. Either it's the protagonist or the love interest lead or something. But in EStA, all the main supporting characters and the protagonist had so many layers. Reminded me a lot of this line from Shrek: "Ogres are like onions. They have layers." Yeah, these characters were all definitely ogres in their own ways, and they had tons of layers. All had their ugly bits and redeeming bits. A lot of the characters seem annoying at first, but then you warm up to them. One of the initially great characters ended up disgusting me. Everything went both ways and was full of ambiguity and gray area, and for that, I want to give this story a standing ovation.

The book ended abruptly, right before we got the answers to some of the biggest questions. The loose ends were left loose and open-ended, which was a tad disappointing. I mean, there was a climax and potential solution to each problem in the side plots, but each of those characters' lives could go in so many different directions from here, so it left me wishing to know exactly what direction they all chose and how their lives ultimately worked out. Still, I think the point King was trying to make was that you never really know what's coming, that you have so many choices and so many paths.

Overall, while Everybody Sees the Ants a quiet, relaxing read, some of the insights about the way in which we all deal with problems, the way we want someone to stand up for us because they're all turning their heads the other way and pretending problems don't exist--or they're addressing the wrong problems completely (like Jodi thinking Lucky is depressed and try slipping him antidepressants) really surprised me. I ended up connecting to this book on such a deeper and personal level than I ever expected starting out. As cheesy as this sounds, it left me feeling a little more whole and more confident in the person that I am, because this showed that everyone faces problems, deep conflicting and ambiguous problems, that don't always have clear solutions. Just keep living and experiencing life. You might be surprised that someone really is willing to stick up for you, even if it is just your imagination. I'm really not doing the issues in this book any kind of justice. You have to read it to understand the complexity and just how real and personal these problems are.

Read this and don't judge on the first 50 or so pages of seemingly stereotypical teenage angst.

4/5 stars