The Thing About My Uncle, by Peter J. Stavros, AUG 2024 LTER
Talk Reviews of Early Reviewers Books
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It’s hard to get excited about Peter Stavros’ debut novel, The Thing About My Uncle. It’s a premise we’ve seen before – the bored, underachieving teen who gets expelled from school and is sent off to a barely-known relative to get straightened out. The uncle (Theo) is the requisite crusty old bachelor who eventually turns the nephew around, and we can probably assume everyone lived happily ever after.
There’s nothing really wrong with Stavros’ writing, but there’s not a lot of originality here, and there are an awful lot of plot holes, most of which can’t be discussed without violating the Reviewer’s Code and dropping spoilers left and right.
Fourteen-year-old Rhett Littlefield is the teen, accused (unfairly, in this case) of a substantial violation of school rules, and his single mom is pretty well at the end of her rope when she sends him off to her brother Theo, living “deep in the hollers of Eastern Kentucky”. Uncle Theo, as it turns out, is a man of … let us say “situational morality”, which is one of the biggest problems the reader will have in accepting him as a role model. The other huge hurdle is that Rhett is the narrator of this coming-of-age tale, but at no time does his voice ring true as that of an adolescent. This is one of those rare stories which would have benefitted from being told in flashback. That, at least, would explain why this supposed slacker kid has the vocabulary and self-examination faculties of a mature adult.
Things bump along without much drama for a while. There’s a dog, and a mountain bike, and a firmly-imposed but largely self-directed set of remedial schoolwork. Rhett wavers between feeling sorry for himself and trying to find out more about his uncle’s clouded past. The climax comes when unfinished business from that past explodes in violence, and Rhett discovers why his father disappeared so abruptly from his life ten years earlier. (Without committing a spoiler here, this is one of the plot points that makes the least amount of sense – both the way the disappearance fractured the family and the total absence of contact over the ensuing years.)
Overall, this is a game attempt that ultimately falls short of the goal.
There’s nothing really wrong with Stavros’ writing, but there’s not a lot of originality here, and there are an awful lot of plot holes, most of which can’t be discussed without violating the Reviewer’s Code and dropping spoilers left and right.
Fourteen-year-old Rhett Littlefield is the teen, accused (unfairly, in this case) of a substantial violation of school rules, and his single mom is pretty well at the end of her rope when she sends him off to her brother Theo, living “deep in the hollers of Eastern Kentucky”. Uncle Theo, as it turns out, is a man of … let us say “situational morality”, which is one of the biggest problems the reader will have in accepting him as a role model. The other huge hurdle is that Rhett is the narrator of this coming-of-age tale, but at no time does his voice ring true as that of an adolescent. This is one of those rare stories which would have benefitted from being told in flashback. That, at least, would explain why this supposed slacker kid has the vocabulary and self-examination faculties of a mature adult.
Things bump along without much drama for a while. There’s a dog, and a mountain bike, and a firmly-imposed but largely self-directed set of remedial schoolwork. Rhett wavers between feeling sorry for himself and trying to find out more about his uncle’s clouded past. The climax comes when unfinished business from that past explodes in violence, and Rhett discovers why his father disappeared so abruptly from his life ten years earlier. (Without committing a spoiler here, this is one of the plot points that makes the least amount of sense – both the way the disappearance fractured the family and the total absence of contact over the ensuing years.)
Overall, this is a game attempt that ultimately falls short of the goal.
