'Welton Blake has done it! He's asked out Carmella McKenzie - the best-looking girl in school - and she's only gone and said yes! But just as he thinks his luck is starting to change, Welton's phone breaks, kick-starting a series of unfortunate and humiliating events. With bullies to avoid, girls ready to knock him out and all the drama with his mum and dad, life for Welton is about to go very, very wrong ... Hilarity follows disaster in this sharp-witted tale of the trials of teen life from award-winning author Alex Wheatle.'
If there's one thing this book has helped me to realise is that you couldn't pay me to live through high school again. The amount of drama, heartache, and feelings of your world coming to an end that the lead character feels in this book really made me remember just how heightened and crazy life as a teen is, and I'm so glad that part of my life is behind me.
Sadly, it's not for Welton Blake, who starts the book by doing something really big and scary, asking out the girl he fancies. Thankfully, this goes well for Welton, and Carmella McKenzie, the best looking girl in school, agrees to go out to the movies with him. Unfortunately, this is the only real time where things are going right for him for most of this book.
The next day he waked up to his phone having broke, and he can't message Carmella about their date. Worrying that things might have already been messed up it gets even worse for him as he throws up over a girl in class, gets beaten up by a bully, lands himself in detention, and that's just the first day. From here on out it's bad thing after bad thing for Welton, and it quickly feels like things are falling apart for the young teen. Like I said, it's 'end-of-the-world' stuff.
Over the course of the book readers get to see Welton trying to do everything he can to set things back on course for himself, but thanks to those pesky teen fears he doesn't do the simple of thing of just talking to the people he needs to, which just allows his own imagination to conjure up worst case scenarios for him, driving him mad.
Whilst as an adult I was able to look at a lot of what Welton was doing and found myself thinking if he just calmed down a bit and thought things through rationally he'd be okay, this is of course not what teens do, and I quickly found myself remembering equally as embarrassing and awful things from my own past. This is one of the best things about the book, the fact that it's so relatable. Even for someone like myself who's well out of the target age range of the book. Even though times have changed a lot since I was in school that sense of everything being so important, and every bad thing feeling like it was going to wreck your whole world is a fairly universal feeling, and is still one that teens today will know well.
Welton and his story will connect with a lot of readers. Even if you've never been in the exact same situations as Welton, you'll have experienced similar, and will be able to see some of yourself in this book.
This is the first Alex Wheatkle book that I've read, but I can see why he's such a beloved children's author, the book is incredibly relatable, and it's something that teens can latch onto. They can see themselves in these characters and situations, they can share in the embarrassment and shame, and see that despite this things work out well for Welton, and can see that if they just keep going and striving forward things will work out for them too.
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