Shannon’s Reviews > Jasper Jones > Status Update

Well ... I liked it more than I thought I would.

Everything is so loud and boisterous around me. Thumping through my brain. The light is leaking. But I gather myself long enough to commit an astonishing act of bravery. In the middle of town, in front of everyone, I lean in, then and there, and I kiss her, quickly, on the lips. And they're as soft as I remember. I hope I haven't impaled her eye with the frame of my glasses.

"Don't you want to go see her so you can link arms and finish each other's sentences and share pieces of food and smooch under the fireworks and serenade her with panpipes?"
"Panpipes?"
"Panpipes, Chuck. It's been verified by scienticians. In Paris. Which is a city full of blouses like you. Girls can't resist being seduced when you blow bamboo flutes. It's fact. It's in their fizzyology."

"Again, all due respect to your insight into the mind of a pirate, but I firmly believe that no matter how optimistic you are, or how desperate or carefree, the issue remains, sir, that should you choose to become romantically entangled with a mermaid there's going to come a point where the fact of their weird fish body is going to present a problem. Do you understand?"
"But, Chuck, the boobies."

"Incorrect, Chuck. It's not the fish part that's the attraction. Pirates see fish every day. Their trick is just to focus on the boobies and squint away the fishy bits, which is easy with enough rum. As a pirate, you take your boobies, you enjoy them, and you don't complain. Pirates aren't fussy. It's really one of those 'glass half full'-type things."

"But they're half fish! Surely that alone is going to negate the thrill of boobies."
"What? Of course not. Chuck, it's harrrrd being a pirate. It's lonely. You take what you can get on the open seas."
"Noted. Sure. But I feel we're missing my central point here, and that is: they're half a fish. You could potentially deep-fry the lower part of their body with chips and it would be delicious."

Late in the morning on New Year's Eve, Jeffrey Lu is declaring his intention to master the One-Inch Punch.
"You have a one-inch what?"
"You're an idiot. The One-Inch Punch. It's karate. It's Bruce Lee. He introduced it to the greater martial arts community. Jeffrey Lu is going to make it famous."

There's a low dog with its teeth in my shirt, hassling and tugging and pulling me down with the insistent thought that it wasn't enough, that it would never ever be enough.
Because Jeffrey Lu was a hero today and when he got to the top they dragged him back to the bottom.
Because those men struck his father, over and over, and they destroyed something beautiful. And nothing will ever happen to them.

Sorry means you feel the pulse of other people's pain as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it. And so it binds us together, makes us as trodden and sodden as one another. Sorry is a lot of things. It's a hole refilled. A debt repaid. Sorry is sometimes self-pit. But Sorry, really, is not about you. It's theirs to take or leave.

Every instance in my life, I've felt like the exact opposite of Superman. Except this time, this moment right now. Because right now I know I would save the girl. I know that I would rather risk the planet than let harm befall Eliza Wishart. I would save her in a second. Because I can imagine her and me huddled safe together while the earth falls under evil designs, but I can't imagine the world without her in it.