A very emotional, heartbreaking, dramatic and at the same time funny story, but the word that suits it the most is: Terrific
In spite of the slow beginning (am I the only one that felt that?) the character of Doug knew how to worm himself a way to my heart, the numerous sides of his personality in the first pages left me lost and confused: he loves his mother, he fears his abusive father, his brothers are jerks and he don't want to be like them but sometimes he acts as they would do, you wonder if he is completely dumb or almost genius...
The writing is marvellous: the book is written with Doug's point of view, generally when a novel is written the point of view of a character all the emotional stuff and information that are transmitted are sort of biased but with Okay for now they aren't because Doug never describes an emotion he describe the scene that caused the emotion and ask " do you know what it feels to ..."
The subtlety of the writing: when he repeats all the times " I'm not lying" as if he wasn't used to be believed and all the sentence left without really an ending like when the coach tore his shirt in PE : "Everything in the gym stopped—again. But this time, it wasn't because I was mouthing off to Coach Reed. It was because of what they saw.
And what they saw—it's not any of your stupid business."
Or when he is speaking with Lil in a lesson of English:
I should tell you that I was revealing this terrible secret to Lil while Miss Cowper was trying to teach us the Wonders of the Adverb and that when she asked if Lil and I had anything we'd like to share with the whole class, we stopped, quickly understanding that Miss Cowper was watching us angrily and would beat us mercilessly if we did not cease immediately. And I'm giving you that last sentence just to show that you can too talk and learn at the same time. I have had to read this sentence twice to understand ( perhaps I'm dumb :))
Schmidt did really a good work with this book he created a strong and very attachable character with dark background but his genius remain that he didn't overdo it or make the lecture pity Doug
An amazing book to read absolutely