About a Boy - ISBNLookup.com

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Among the chroniclers of contemporary British life, Nick Hornby is one of the select few whose books have found a welcome on both sides of the Atlantic. Hornby's previous novel, the hugely popular High Fidelity, was essentially a belated coming-of-age tale, centered on the hilarious misadventures of a music-obsessed Londoner in his mid-30s; About a Boy expands upon this proven formula to portray the dual coming-of-age rituals of a precocious adolescent and a terminally hip slacker on the verge of middle age.

Hornby's protaganist is Will Lightman, a perennial guest at life's eternal cocktail party. Due to a happy accident of birth, Will has never had to work; but, as his friends have drifted away into meaningful marriages and careers, he finds himself, at 36, mostly alone, desperately hip, and leading the quintessential unexamined life. Then, a chance affair opens his eyes to a unique opportunity for endless low-emotional-risk liaisons: lonely divorced mothers! Ever resourceful, Will passes himself off as a single father, signs up for the next meeting of Single Parents-Alone Together, then blithely sets out to hold auditions for his next conquest. But things don't turn out exactly as planned. Through a complicated chain of events, Will finds himself the de facto guardian of a peculiar 12-year-old trouble magnet named Marcus, who soon susses out the truth behind Will's rather dodgy secret but cultivates Will for reasons of his own.

How these two emotionally stunted misfits learn to build a meaningful relationship makes for an intensely affecting and genuinely comic story. Like its predecessor, this irrepressible joy of a novel synthesizes dead-on cultural references and keen observation of the human condition. Nick Hornby's prose may have an English accent, but his theme is universal. Greg Marrs

Michiko Kakutani

Boy [is] a lot of fun to read....[I]f we can see the novel's conclusion coming far off down the pike, Mr. Hornby's sharp observations and his quirky comedic instincts insure that our journey there is entertaining, funny -- and occasionally affecting.
— The New York Times

People Magazine

An amusing male-bonding theme...stylish, well-observed.

Boston Globe

Hilariously loopy.

Hal Espen

Hornby...combines a skilled, intuitive appreciation for the rigors of comic structure with highly original insights about the way the enchantments of popular culture insinuate themselves into middle-class notions of romance. —The New York Times Book Review

New Yorker

Hornby has established himself...as the maestro of the male confessional.

GQ

Clever and winning.

The New Yorker

Hornby has established himself...as the maestro of the male confessional.

The Boston Globe

Hilariously loopy.

Hal Espen

Kirkus Reviews

The originality and fun spilling over in Hornby's acclaimed debut, High Fidelity (1995), run deep and strong through this second novel, as a playboy pretends he's a single dad so he can date single moms, but finds his fantasies warped by the real needs of an unusual 12-year-old boy. Set for life in London with royalties from a sappy Christmas song his father wrote, Will Lightman does nothing all day except be cool—something he does extremely well. And he chases women, with intermittent success. When chance throws a beautiful mom his way, he makes the most of the opportunity, even though she dumps him because she thinks he's ready for commitment and she isn't. No matter: He joins a single parents' group, inventing a toddler named Ned, and is well on the way to another conquest when frizzy-haired loner Marcus and his depressive hippie mother Fiona intervene. They all meet on the day Fiona tries to kill herself, and while Will's really just a friendly bystander, Marcus, in desperation, seizes on him as the solution to their problems. He follows Will to see where he lives, and, after quickly seeing through the toddler ruse, takes to barging in on his "friend" nearly every day after school. While hardly in agreement with this turn of events, Will is still enough of a boy himself to recognize that the lad needs a hand, and finds himself caring enough to buy Marcus cool sneakers, which are promptly stolen by the gang at school who harass Marcus daily. But Will provides the key that gives Marcus a first girlfriend, and then is repaid in kind when he meets another beautiful mom, falls in love, and persuades Marcus to act as his son to keep her from getting away. Far more thanjust boys will be boys, this has the right mix of hilarity and irrepressible characters to attract a wide audience: an upbeat, unqualified success.