Rats Saw God

Rats Saw God
By: Rob Thomas
202 pg.
Publisher: Simon Pulse

ISBN-10: 1416938974
ISBN-13: 978-1416938972

Annotation:

In hopes of graduating, Steve York agrees to complete a hundred-page writing assignment which helps him to sort out his relationship with his famous astronaut father and the events that changed him from promising student to troubled teen.

Summary:

As the story opens our protagonist Steve York is dealing with the effect of the pending divorce between his parents, his father affectionately known as the Astronaut and his mother. After trying to live up to the high expectations placed on him by his father such as Straight A’s and a part-time job, Steve cracks and escapes to a better reality with the help of drugs and a random group of friends everything comes crashing down. Now removed from all of that, he is living with his mother and her new husband an only one assignment separating him from his high school graduation, a 100 page paper on the subject of himself. Forced to reexamine how he has reached this point of his life, this novel allows the reader to reflect not only on the telling story of Steve, but perhaps on their own high school experience as well.

Steve’s coming of age is not nearly as smooth as we expect, through these hundred pages we are forced to examine his first love, first sexual experience and even the traumatic first heartbreak.
This novel exemplifies the difficulties of coming-of-age with a character as real as you or one of your friends.