About A Boy
By Nick Hornby
“About a Boy” is Nick Hornby’s third best-seller in recent years, but what is it about this novel that captures the hearts and minds of the readers?
I have just finished reading “About a Boy” by Britain’s best loved author Nick Hornby. I find that this novel capture the hearts of the reader, but at the same time also covers very depressed, disturbing moments, yet at the same time he makes them very humorous.
The two main characters in this novel are Marcus Brewer and Will Freeman. Marcus is being bullied at school as he is “strange” and he often starts to sing in class without realising, which makes him suffer more. Will is the opposite as he his “sub zero”. The two characters meet when Will joins SPAT (single parents -alone together) to meet good looking single women who aren’t clingy. This is where he meets Suzie who invites him to a picnic at the park, during this day Marcus and Will meet. It is also known as the “dead duck day” as Marcus accidentally kills a duck (by throwing an entire loaf of bread at it). The relationship gets stronger when Will defends Marcus in front of the park keeper saying that he was trying to sink the duck to stop Megan from getting upset.
The two main characters are very different as Marcus Brewer is “the oldest 12 year old in the world”. Even the name Marcus is a really old fashioned name for a young boy. He has the awareness to know why he get bullied at school, he knows it’s because he doesn’t have the right look and that he always has the wrong hair cut, shoes, clothes , even his taste in music is wrong because his mum picks it for him. His mum even choose that he was a vegetarian. “ sarcasm, Will was beginning to see, was a language that Marcus found peculiarly baffling.” This was because Marcus took everything far too seriously he wouldn’t even watch soaps on the television because he thought his mum would find them too depressing.
Will Freeman in the other hand...