{"id":675,"date":"2013-04-29T09:26:12","date_gmt":"2013-04-29T17:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=675"},"modified":"2013-04-29T09:26:12","modified_gmt":"2013-04-29T17:26:12","slug":"skippy-dies-review-on-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/29\/skippy-dies-review-on-goodreads\/","title":{"rendered":"Skippy Dies\u2014Review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a style=\"float: left; padding-right: 20px;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/7146335-skippy-dies\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Skippy Dies\" src=\"http:\/\/d.gr-assets.com\/books\/1301970939m\/7146335.jpg\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/7146335-skippy-dies\">Skippy Dies<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/author\/show\/4408937.Paul_Murray\">Paul Murray<\/a><\/p>\n<p>My rating: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/show\/602848562\">3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s another British boarding school novel for you. I mean that as a neutral statement\u2014if you love this sort of thing, <em>Skippy Dies<\/em> delivers. If you\u2019re tired of it, there\u2019s nothing here to make it worth your while to wade through.<\/p>\n<p>For a lot of us, British boarding schools are Harry Potter and Pink Floyd. Evil teachers, child molestation, a smorgasbord of bullying, indifferent parents. Skippy Dies has all of that. Drug use and abuse, sex, sexual deviance, sexual violence. Forgive me for the easy comparison, but <em>Skippy Dies<\/em> is like an Irish Irvine Welsh writing about 2nd year students, without out all of the accents spelled out phonetically.<\/p>\n<p>Not that Paul Murray\u2019s writing lacks style. He\u2019s funny at times, sweet, bittersweet, and heavy. Matter-of fact sections juxtaposed with streams of consciousness. He keeps you guessing\u2014magic realism? No, just youthful innocence, set up to be quashed, utterly, by the absolute and total indifference of the universe. This is heavy stuff. Not coming-of-age, so much as coming-of-angst.<\/p>\n<p>No spoiler\u2014Skippy does indeed die, right in the beginning, so we can go back in time and look at the \u201cevents\u201d that led to the \u201ctragedy.\u201d The real tragedy, of course, is that death is just another swirly, another spit ball, another brick in the wall. Except that upper-middle class boarding schools don\u2019t produce, eventually, deeply depressed artists who suffer and sing. They just produce more upper-middle class parents who are as indifferent as the universe that used to mystify them.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/list\/377051-jason-edwards\">View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Skippy Dies by Paul Murray My rating: 3 of 5 stars Here\u2019s another British boarding school novel for you. I mean that as a neutral statement\u2014if you love this sort of thing, Skippy Dies delivers. If you\u2019re tired of it, there\u2019s nothing here to make it worth your while to wade through. For a lot &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/29\/skippy-dies-review-on-goodreads\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Skippy Dies\u2014Review on Goodreads&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-aT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":677,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions\/677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}