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The Boy Detective Fails (Punk Planet Books)
by Joe Meno

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102504.The_Boy_Detective_Fails?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Boy Detective Fails (Punk Planet Books)" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1171485545m/102504.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102504.The_Boy_Detective_Fails?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Boy Detective Fails</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/12851.Joe_Meno">Joe Meno</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5044821?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 3 of 5 stars I've given The Boy Detective Fails three stars. All three of them are for the characters and incidental events. None of them are for the book's main plot line.
 
 I completely identified with Billy Argo, especially when he explained his fear of not knowing the right answer when it counts. I developed little fiction-crushes on Caroline and Penny. But for brevity, I'll focus mostly on the Mumford children. Their personalities and foibles are excellent, excellent writing. Effie's science projects take the poster-board and macaroni tools of elementary school science and use them to probe deeply into the human experience. It's really amazing writing. Her model rocketry experiment is the best. The idea of lonely little children shooting message-in-a-bottle model rockets into the blackness of the night and waiting for someone, anyone, to respond... Upon reading that passage I kind of just mulled over it in awe little while.
 
 Unfortunately, for me anyway, the insight of this book, taken as a whole, is a good deal less than the sum of its parts. I don't agree with the author's decision to actually ramp up the amount of inexplicable supernatural events seen by adult Billy. It is related through the story that Child-Genius Billy unmasked lots of bogus phantoms, very much in the tradition of Scooby-Doo. I was totally hooked on the story during the first chapter. Billy, triumphant, gave me both nostalgia for all the Hardy Boys and Bobbsey Twins source material (of which I used to consume enormous quantities) and for my own childhood. (I was hardly a Billy-Argo-level genius, but I had a Billy-Argo-level ego.) Ah, child geniuses -- there seem to be so many more of them than there are adult geniuses. Billy's fall is basically inevitable, and I relished the dread of it.
 
 But next, thirty year old Billy Argo emerges into a world that includes a cabal of supervillains more suited to The Tick than to Nancy Drew or even Tom Swift. Buildings mysteriously vanish, real ghosts and a sort of headless horseman make appearances. A gang of assassins uses something which is described as acid, but which leaves behind limbs that are invisible but somehow still functional. I understand what the author is trying to do. He's trying to depict the unsatisfactorily indecipherable complexity of adult life. Young Billy always unmasked the phantom. Adult Billy accosts the phantom only to find he really and truly doesn't have a face. Kid problems are easy. Adult problems are not. Okay, I get it. I just don't like the implementation. People use the supernatural when describing phenomena for which they do not understand the physics, or the immediate cause. Relying on supernatural explanations seems less common with adults than with children, not more common. Adults are usually very good at rationalizing mundane causes for odd events. Adults, more jaded, are less likely to be surprised. Magic leaves our consciousness as we grow, and that is part of our nostalgia for childhood, in my estimation. The author asserts at one point that adults fear magic, and I don't really agree with that. They sort of just become "disenchanted" (agh! bad pun). The problem for adults is another level back. We find that we can explain the "how" of something all day long, and are usually still paranoid that there is some deeper "why" floating out there beyond our understanding. I think Joe Meno chopped off his assessment of the adult thought process at least one stage too early.
 
 If you used to be a science whiz kid, and you now lost your ability to explain the most rudimentary physics, you in the real world might be as perplexed as Billy Argo in his fictional disappearing city. You might really identify with The Boy Detective Fails. But that's not the way it works for me or anybody I know. For me the Boy Detective really did fail to identify the truth of the matter.
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/306042?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Sam's review
rating:
recommended for: flat earth believers

I've given The Boy Detective Fails three stars. All three of them are for the characters and incidental events. None of them are for the book's main plot line.

I completely identified with Billy Argo, especially when he explained his fear of not knowing the right answer when it counts. I developed little fiction-crushes on Caroline and Penny. But for brevity, I'll focus mostly on the Mumford children. Their personalities and foibles are excellent, excellent writing. Effie's science projects take the poster-board and macaroni tools of elementary school science and use them to probe deeply into the human experience. It's really amazing writing. Her model rocketry experiment is the best. The idea of lonely little children shooting message-in-a-bottle model rockets into the blackness of the night and waiting for someone, anyone, to respond... Upon reading that passage I kind of just mulled over it in awe little while.

Unfortunately, for me anyway, the insight of this book, ...more I've given The Boy Detective Fails three stars. All three of them are for the characters and incidental events. None of them are for the book's main plot line.

I completely identified with Billy Argo, especially when he explained his fear of not knowing the right answer when it counts. I developed little fiction-crushes on Caroline and Penny. But for brevity, I'll focus mostly on the Mumford children. Their personalities and foibles are excellent, excellent writing. Effie's science projects take the poster-board and macaroni tools of elementary school science and use them to probe deeply into the human experience. It's really amazing writing. Her model rocketry experiment is the best. The idea of lonely little children shooting message-in-a-bottle model rockets into the blackness of the night and waiting for someone, anyone, to respond... Upon reading that passage I kind of just mulled over it in awe little while.

Unfortunately, for me anyway, the insight of this book, taken as a whole, is a good deal less than the sum of its parts. I don't agree with the author's decision to actually ramp up the amount of inexplicable supernatural events seen by adult Billy. It is related through the story that Child-Genius Billy unmasked lots of bogus phantoms, very much in the tradition of Scooby-Doo. I was totally hooked on the story during the first chapter. Billy, triumphant, gave me both nostalgia for all the Hardy Boys and Bobbsey Twins source material (of which I used to consume enormous quantities) and for my own childhood. (I was hardly a Billy-Argo-level genius, but I had a Billy-Argo-level ego.) Ah, child geniuses -- there seem to be so many more of them than there are adult geniuses. Billy's fall is basically inevitable, and I relished the dread of it.

But next, thirty year old Billy Argo emerges into a world that includes a cabal of supervillains more suited to The Tick than to Nancy Drew or even Tom Swift. Buildings mysteriously vanish, real ghosts and a sort of headless horseman make appearances. A gang of assassins uses something which is described as acid, but which leaves behind limbs that are invisible but somehow still functional. I understand what the author is trying to do. He's trying to depict the unsatisfactorily indecipherable complexity of adult life. Young Billy always unmasked the phantom. Adult Billy accosts the phantom only to find he really and truly doesn't have a face. Kid problems are easy. Adult problems are not. Okay, I get it. I just don't like the implementation. People use the supernatural when describing phenomena for which they do not understand the physics, or the immediate cause. Relying on supernatural explanations seems less common with adults than with children, not more common. Adults are usually very good at rationalizing mundane causes for odd events. Adults, more jaded, are less likely to be surprised. Magic leaves our consciousness as we grow, and that is part of our nostalgia for childhood, in my estimation. The author asserts at one point that adults fear magic, and I don't really agree with that. They sort of just become "disenchanted" (agh! bad pun). The problem for adults is another level back. We find that we can explain the "how" of something all day long, and are usually still paranoid that there is some deeper "why" floating out there beyond our understanding. I think Joe Meno chopped off his assessment of the adult thought process at least one stage too early.

If you used to be a science whiz kid, and you now lost your ability to explain the most rudimentary physics, you in the real world might be as perplexed as Billy Argo in his fictional disappearing city. You might really identify with The Boy Detective Fails. But that's not the way it works for me or anybody I know. For me the Boy Detective really did fail to identify the truth of the matter....less

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message 1: by Kate

08/31/2007 04:50AM

Really enjoyed reading your review - very thorough.