My friend Frank started like many versions of the good doctor Frankenstein’s infamous experiments often do with a curiosity. Intro: I am honored that Jonni asked me to write a guest post about how I brought my Paper Mache Monster “Frank” to life and to be able to share my work with this community and be amongst this caliber of Artists. I started this book at lunch one day, and found that Jacob had won me over before I’d finished my sandwich.How I made my Paper Mache Monster, Frank! (Why work so hard to shut others out? Why not make oneself useful for a change?) But Jacob is just the kind of junior criminal-smart, devilishly perceptive, secretly sentimental-with whom I really can identify. I confess that I am something of a goody-two-shoes myself, and in the past I’ve had little patience for all that sullen self-pity, pent-up anger, and nascent sexual pining. “The Patterns of Paper Monsters” presents an interesting challenge to grown-up, strait-laced readers who tend to avoid books about troubled youths. “He was staring at me with epic nostalgia, like my face was a paved-over rain forest,” Jacob says of Jim, an adult volunteer assigned to mentor him. But equally fun to read are the moments when Jacob finds himself feeling vulnerable-usually when someone else meets his coolness with a display of raw emotion. Rathbone writes Jacob some great bits of irreverent commentary: “Family day is when the disparate elements of our broken families collect here at the JDC in a veritable Who’s Who of the Braddock County welfare set,” he quips when his mother comes to visit. He finds Andrea “really pretty, like babysitter pretty.” A date with a previous girlfriend was like “rolling down the side of a hot grassy hill on a pretty good day.” And happiness? “It’s like trying to pee when you’re really high-sometimes it seems impossible but it’s not like I don’t know how.” It’s an appealingly understated teen-age love story, and Jacob’s offbeat descriptions are charming. The budding romance between Jacob and Andrea is believably stilted and messy it moves in fits and starts, with Jacob’s motives alternating between a deep need for companionship and the simple desire for sex. “I’m usually pretty good at sculpting conversations for personal effect kind of veering them toward some self-deprecating exchange that conveys how great and wounded or smart I am,” Jacob reflects, after an exchange with Andrea-a fellow inmate-renders him momentarily speechless. The best thing about Jacob is that he is remarkably self-aware: even as he’s feeling sorry for himself or slyly manipulating some well-meaning adult tasked with helping him, he is frank about what he is up to. He may be cut from the same cloth as Holden Caulfield, but he’s a good bit funnier and a lot less mopey than the angsty adolescent male narrators from many coming-of-age books that have followed “Catcher in the Rye.” Rathbone’s novel is divided into bite-sized episodes-some darkly humorous scenes from inside the detention center, others poignant memories-all unflinchingly described and analyzed by Jacob himself. Everything is sad and pointless? It’s a dire conclusion for such a young person to reach, but it’s not hard to see how he got to that point: after a childhood filled with poverty, drugs, and a series of abusive father figures, Jacob has landed in a juvenile detention center following a robbery attempt gone awry.
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