Guest review: Gus Mattiske (age 10) on Paul Jennings

A Different Boy, Paul Jennings, Allen and Unwin

A Different Boy by Paul Jennings is a really interesting book about a boy who is different. If you read the book you might think that the word different means a differential to other people as in ‘the boy was different’. You also might think that the word is referring to different to what was originally thought – the boy wasn’t what they thought – he was a different boy. It is good because Paul Jennings has written it in a very serious style where there are very serious comments made by the main character. I like it this way because Paul Jennings is really good, the way he can write stuff like that, but unfortunately most of his books are funny and silly, inappropriate books. It isn’t that good because the comments can be a bit unnecessary at that time in the book and Paul Jennings could have put them earlier or later.

Paul Jennings has written another book in that series called A Different Dog (2017). A Different Dog is also a very serious book.

The illustrations in the book are very good and they give the reader a better idea of the character even though Paul Jennings describes them well. The illustrations are very creative and imaginative and they suit the style that Paul Jennings writes in.

If you’ve got a bad deal

In Paul Jennings’ fable-like, spare children’s novella A Different Boy (Allen & Unwin), a boy, Anton, escapes an orphanage and by accident boards an ocean liner with another boy and his mother. The ship is heading for the ‘New Land’, described in phrases from the Dorothea Mackellar poem ‘My Country’, so we take it to mean Australia, though the book describes a typical refugee experience of escaping a war-torn country and the deaths of family members. Anton takes the phrase ‘if you’ve got a bad deal… move on’ as his motto, but the book shows how a painful past can travel with us, causing us to not see things as clearly as we could, but also how sharing this experience helps us move on.