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The Fly Strip
Weed Clapper, a witty, resilient seventeen-year-old, journeys to Indiana amid the growing racial unrest of 1960. When his black friend is terrorized by the KKK, Weed begins to uncover the dark secrets of this small Midwestern town. He turns to his beautiful young teacher for support, and tumbles into a most forbidden love affair. Laugh-out-loud funny, and yet achingly poignant, the story of Weed's journey to defy convention and to defend his sense of justice will cause you to stand up and cheer for this charming, hilarious - and unlikely - hero.
278 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 17, 2016
5★
Among other things, this is literally a coming-of-age story, with Weed Clapper on the verge of turning 18, which is of-age when you’re sending kids to war.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Weed (nickname) is a funny, sarcastic, troubled kid whose parents and adored little brother were killed in a car crash. Not “lost” because he knows where they are. He reminds me of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, except I never cared as much about Holden as I care about Weed.
We meet him as he’s getting ready to move from the city of Scranton, PA to his grandmother Ollie’s home in rural Indiana and its cornfields.
There’s a factory near town:
“When the corn is cooking, the air in town turns a dreary brown. You can taste the odor. It smells like infected feet. I’ll never be able to face a bowl of corn flakes again without thinking of plantar warts.”
BLECH!
Weed is a marvellous mixture of inexperienced kid, hormone-driven teen, and sensitive young man who has been pummelled by life and trying to deal with it from all those perspectives. To top it off, he limps badly from some unexplained (until much later) leg injury and seems to think people judge him by his disability.
At his new school, he’s a city slicker (reckons he looks a bit like Elvis) who helps one of the nerdy kids become cool by coaching him in how to fix his hair and clothes.
He maintains a heartfelt and amusing correspondence with his old hometown buddies, and they share war stories and worries. They've been pals forever and they're all finishing high school. One is black, one is Jewish (studious and set for college and has been told "to get himself some good shoes because Jews are destined to wander the earth forever" ).
Weed is very bright and interested in literature, but he gets so riled up about things, that he ditches school a lot. He’s extremely fond of a very young teacher, Laura, who kind of adopts him and lends him books.
She’s going with some ne’er-do-well (Weed doesn’t like him and neither do we), and she is also being stalked by a veteran who returned home as a physically and mentally damaged shell of his former self, while his best friend died. Weed is repelled by him but feels terrible that he has this reaction to a wounded soldier, especially considering his own bad leg.
There’s plenty of death and serious stuff, and there’s adult romance, a pregnancy, gossip and mystery, but there’s also funny teen-aged angst. When back in Scranton, he and his Jewish friend Murray, (the one with top grades) decided the Catholics had it all figured out with confession.
“So Murray and I decided to confess to each other in my dad’s tool shed. We even swiped some pop-beads from Murray’s mother to ensure proper procedure. Unfortunately, there are certain nocturnal habits a guy can’t even confess to his best friend, if you get my drift. So somehow that spring, the sex and God thing got all mixed up.
Then learn about gays “guys who prefer ‘same-sex'. Murray reckoned that ‘same-sex’ must refer to when a guy rubs himself for his own perverted pleasure, so I knew then I was doomed.”
Later he says things like: “After I same-sexed myself . . ."
Funny kid. Meanwhile, in Indiana, he bumps up hard against racial prejudice when he begins casually befriending some local blacks. He can’t believe people seriously worry about skin colour. To someone who's happy to 'hire' blacks but not mingle, he says:
“Aren’t you afraid people will think you’re a laundry lady, the way you go to such trouble to separate colors from whites?”
When a would-be girlfriend warns he will be thought to be low-class for associating with blacks (Negros, colored people in the book), he says:
“Low-class? And this comes from the parents who told you Hyannis Port is a liquor?”
There’s a local farmer who flies a helicopter in spite of suffering from narcolepsy, sudden sleep attacks that occur at ‘inconvenient’ times, a black family who sort of adopt him, the local drugstore owner who feeds him ice cream, and his grandmother, the delightful Ollie, a retired ‘exotic dancer’, no less. And she still dresses to impress.
“It was the shoes that really killed me. You know those sexy shoes with high heels and no backs that make a guy think dirty thoughts? Well, Ollie’s clodhoppers were wedged into a pair of those, her meaty hooves rupturing over the edges so that she resembled a giant roast beef served up on two Yorkshire pudding popovers. I was speechless.”
After some local tragic meetings with the KKK and still suffering with nightmares about his little brother, he is miserable and thinks about the flies he’s seen stuck on fly strips.
“We’re all struggling like helpless insects. We’d be better off if God would just put us out of our misery with one hefty swat. At least it would be merciful. Maybe a guy has to do everything himself.”
I was completely absorbed by Weed’s story and his friends and their stories. It’s not all fun and games, but it’s very real.
Thanks to NetGalley and Waldorf Publishing for the preview copy from which I've quoted, (so the quotes could have changed). I just loved it! Great for all ages.
Among other things, this is literally a coming-of-age story, with Weed Clapper on the verge of turning 18, which is of-age when you’re sending kids to war.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Weed (nickname) is a funny, sarcastic, troubled kid whose parents and adored little brother were killed in a car crash. Not “lost” because he knows where they are. He reminds me of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, except I never cared as much about Holden as I care about Weed.
We meet him as he’s getting ready to move from the city of Scranton, PA to his grandmother Ollie’s home in rural Indiana and its cornfields.
There’s a factory near town:
“When the corn is cooking, the air in town turns a dreary brown. You can taste the odor. It smells like infected feet. I’ll never be able to face a bowl of corn flakes again without thinking of plantar warts.”
BLECH!
Weed is a marvellous mixture of inexperienced kid, hormone-driven teen, and sensitive young man who has been pummelled by life and trying to deal with it from all those perspectives. To top it off, he limps badly from some unexplained (until much later) leg injury and seems to think people judge him by his disability.
At his new school, he’s a city slicker (reckons he looks a bit like Elvis) who helps one of the nerdy kids become cool by coaching him in how to fix his hair and clothes.
He maintains a heartfelt and amusing correspondence with his old hometown buddies, and they share war stories and worries. They've been pals forever and they're all finishing high school. One is black, one is Jewish (studious and set for college and has been told "to get himself some good shoes because Jews are destined to wander the earth forever" ).
Weed is very bright and interested in literature, but he gets so riled up about things, that he ditches school a lot. He’s extremely fond of a very young teacher, Laura, who kind of adopts him and lends him books.
She’s going with some ne’er-do-well (Weed doesn’t like him and neither do we), and she is also being stalked by a veteran who returned home as a physically and mentally damaged shell of his former self, while his best friend died. Weed is repelled by him but feels terrible that he has this reaction to a wounded soldier, especially considering his own bad leg.
There’s plenty of death and serious stuff, and there’s adult romance, a pregnancy, gossip and mystery, but there’s also funny teen-aged angst. When back in Scranton, he and his Jewish friend Murray, (the one with top grades) decided the Catholics had it all figured out with confession.
“So Murray and I decided to confess to each other in my dad’s tool shed. We even swiped some pop-beads from Murray’s mother to ensure proper procedure. Unfortunately, there are certain nocturnal habits a guy can’t even confess to his best friend, if you get my drift. So somehow that spring, the sex and God thing got all mixed up.
Then learn about gays “guys who prefer ‘same-sex'. Murray reckoned that ‘same-sex’ must refer to when a guy rubs himself for his own perverted pleasure, so I knew then I was doomed.”
Later he says things like: “After I same-sexed myself . . ."
Funny kid. Meanwhile, in Indiana, he bumps up hard against racial prejudice when he begins casually befriending some local blacks. He can’t believe people seriously worry about skin colour. To someone who's happy to 'hire' blacks but not mingle, he says:
“Aren’t you afraid people will think you’re a laundry lady, the way you go to such trouble to separate colors from whites?”
When a would-be girlfriend warns he will be thought to be low-class for associating with blacks (Negros, colored people in the book), he says:
“Low-class? And this comes from the parents who told you Hyannis Port is a liquor?”
There’s a local farmer who flies a helicopter in spite of suffering from narcolepsy, sudden sleep attacks that occur at ‘inconvenient’ times, a black family who sort of adopt him, the local drugstore owner who feeds him ice cream, and his grandmother, the delightful Ollie, a retired ‘exotic dancer’, no less. And she still dresses to impress.
“It was the shoes that really killed me. You know those sexy shoes with high heels and no backs that make a guy think dirty thoughts? Well, Ollie’s clodhoppers were wedged into a pair of those, her meaty hooves rupturing over the edges so that she resembled a giant roast beef served up on two Yorkshire pudding popovers. I was speechless.”
After some local tragic meetings with the KKK and still suffering with nightmares about his little brother, he is miserable and thinks about the flies he’s seen stuck on fly strips.
“We’re all struggling like helpless insects. We’d be better off if God would just put us out of our misery with one hefty swat. At least it would be merciful. Maybe a guy has to do everything himself.”
I was completely absorbed by Weed’s story and his friends and their stories. It’s not all fun and games, but it’s very real.
Thanks to NetGalley and Waldorf Publishing for the preview copy from which I've quoted, (so the quotes could have changed). I just loved it! Great for all ages.
October 8, 2020
This story is set in America in the 1960's in Indiana. It's about a young boy who finds himself in the middle of the integration movement of that time. I really enjoyed this and recommend. It's so different and the voice of the MC is brilliantly constructed. It takes back to a time when racism of any sort was allowed to flourish and shows us that most people were afraid to stand out from the crowd when things were unacceptable and how those caught in the middle accepted their fates.
July 19, 2017
I was excited to read this book, especially because the setting was in Indiana. The story was interesting but it did not hold my attention. Characters were interesting but just did not feel a good connection with me the reader!
April 5, 2016
Gwen Banta's The Fly Strip is an uproariously funny historical novel that will have you in stitches. Cue Shawn Mendes. Malcolm "Weed" Clapper is a seventeen-year-old boy who has suffered a tragedy so painful that when he moved in with his grandmother, he made up stories to explain his injury. Weed's move to Indiana offered him a chance to recover and reinvent himself away from those who knew him best. Now that he's there, he finds himself in a forbidden love relationship and has gotten involved in defying social conventions. Weed's defiance is getting him into trouble, but is that trouble worth his freedom? Can he adapt to his new home?
Gwen Banta is a genius. She managed to convey the seriousness of the times and at the same time managed to inject humor to bring her story to life. Weed's circumstances are not just about good or bad, but how life has a way of happening. Sometimes it's painful and other times it is humorous, and both can happen in equal measure. There were moments where I wanted to cry at the injustice of what was happening or in sympathy with the characters. At other times, I was trying to keep my laughter quiet (as I was reading in the middle of the night) while busting a gut at how funny the scenario was. Being able to bring the readers to those different emotions shows that Banta understands human emotions and life's ups and downs. The character development was moving as Weed overcomes his tragedy, and the other characters change as adolescents do when growing up. This book is not my usual typical book that I would pick up, but I highly recommend it to those with an interest in historical romance novels. While it is not a romance novel, it is highly educational, entertaining, and emotional.
Gwen Banta is a genius. She managed to convey the seriousness of the times and at the same time managed to inject humor to bring her story to life. Weed's circumstances are not just about good or bad, but how life has a way of happening. Sometimes it's painful and other times it is humorous, and both can happen in equal measure. There were moments where I wanted to cry at the injustice of what was happening or in sympathy with the characters. At other times, I was trying to keep my laughter quiet (as I was reading in the middle of the night) while busting a gut at how funny the scenario was. Being able to bring the readers to those different emotions shows that Banta understands human emotions and life's ups and downs. The character development was moving as Weed overcomes his tragedy, and the other characters change as adolescents do when growing up. This book is not my usual typical book that I would pick up, but I highly recommend it to those with an interest in historical romance novels. While it is not a romance novel, it is highly educational, entertaining, and emotional.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews