Tales of the Madman Underground in The Under-Hyped Readathon!

Jan 03, 2013 Megan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: own, realistic-fiction, lgbtqa, 2014, favourites

4.5 stars.

God, did I love this book. And for a number of reasons.

First off, the narrator, Karl is great. He's funny and sarcastic and messed up and just a very interesting character. He has a lot going on in his life (senior year of school, working about 5 jobs, looking after the house and sometimes his mum - a free-spirited hippy who smokes pot and drinks a lot and the Madman Underground) and this book focused on all of those different aspects.

Now, the Madman Underground. About 8 in a therapy g 4.5 stars.

God, did I love this book. And for a number of reasons.

First off, the narrator, Karl is great. He's funny and sarcastic and messed up and just a very interesting character. He has a lot going on in his life (senior year of school, working about 5 jobs, looking after the house and sometimes his mum - a free-spirited hippy who smokes pot and drinks a lot and the Madman Underground) and this book focused on all of those different aspects.

Now, the Madman Underground. About 8 in a therapy group that meet at school, all from different cliques and stuff. This book is set in the 70s - which I also loved - and the differences in what these young people do for fun is quite different and how they operate is as well. Then add in how these people have mental health issues and it becomes quite a unique experience to read this book. The Madman Underground are odd and funny and there are disagreements (a lot of it between Karl and his best friend Paul because Karl wants to leave the Underground and goes about it in a shitty way) and they truly care about each other. I loved reading about them and what they got up to; despite being from Karl's pov, you get a lot of information on the others.

As I mentioned before, this is set in the 70s. A time not so long ago that language and society were too different for me to be able to relate, but long ago enough for things to be fresh and new for me. There were mentions of race and sexuality and though some of them are old-fashioned, a lot of them aren't. Paul, who is maybe gay, maybe isn't, is actually accepted by his friends and there's some very touching scenes between he and Karl. Similarly, Gratz the English teacher gives a bit of speech on how he won't have people saying n****r when referring to black characters in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book they'r reading. I don't know, it intrigued me for some reason.

I could go on and on about this book because I loved so much about it, I really did. But I'll stop here and say that the cast of characters are wonderful and diverse and the writing is just brilliant. ...more

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Feb 05, 2014 Toby Finke rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book was so good. It is very long though, so it took me a long time to read it. I feel this shows the importance of being who you are no matter who you are. It also shows that people have lives much worse than us and yet they go to school with us or work with us or are our neighbors. It also shows that we are privileged to live in this kind of government, while places like Russia are stuck in Communism. I love how they show that normal people have other problems too, like the professor was ...more

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