King Dork - Edgy, Mystery

Tom Henderson, or as he thinks of himself - King Dork, has no illusions about his status in the school hierarchy. Given the abuse and ridicule he receives at the hands of the “Normal” people it would be hard not to realize that he is considered a loser. He has gotten to know his only friend, Sam Hellerman, by default; they stood next to each in line, alphabetically, in grades four through eight. The two friends share an interest in music and video games and together they try to form a band. They constantly change the name of the band, the names of the band members and the name of their first album. These names are quirky and funny and are a source of humor in the book.

Band: Balls Deep

Guitar: Comrade Gal-hammer

Bass and Embroidery: Our Dear Leader

Real fancy and important percussion: The lonely dissident

First Album: We control the horizontal

This book by Frank Portman explores high school through Tom’s eyes. Tom speaks very little but has a running mental commentary that is sarcastic, funny and sad. His policeman father died four years earlier and there are conflicting stories about how he died. He tries to feel closer to his father by reading his father’s collection of books from high school and discovers a ciphered message in one of them. He spends much of the book trying to solve both mysteries. The Catcher in the Rye figures prominently in the story, it is both required reading in school and one of his father’s books.

King Dork is not a book that I liked. I simply could not relate to it and I really didn’t really care about Tom. I also kept waiting to discover the answers to the mysteries, but was disappointed. To be fair, high school students may have quite a different take on the book; I am so far removed from high school that it probably colored my perception.

Mature students who are into bands and music would probably enjoy this book. I would not specifically recommend it to any student, however, because of the sex and the drug use in the book. This brings me to a second problem I had with the book, the few girls in the story are merely there to perform oral sex on Tom. Not only are they merely sexual objects, but I really didn’t think it was plausible that they would be interested in giving King Dork Tom the time of day, let alone be dying to have close personal contact with his private parts.

I read some reviews that were all very positive (although I tend to take reviews with a grain of salt) so I might be totally off the mark. I would be interested to see what others think.

I found the following passage entertaining and might be used as a hook:

First on the program in Mr. Schtuppe’s class, when the introduction had finally ended, was a book called 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. “In 30 days, you will learn how to make words your slaves.”

This book is a big list of fancy-pants words and our job as self-improvement vocabularists was to prove we knew what they meant by saying them aloud and using them in sentences.

Mr. Schtuppe’s unique twist on this was that he managed to mispronounce around half of them.

“The first word is ‘bete noire,’” he said. But he pronounced it “bait noir-ay,” with the emphasis on the “ay.”

“Bait noir-ay,” we all said in unison.

“Excellent. Now, class, listen carefully: magnanimous…”

(We would have to wait until the end of the alphabet before we witnessed Mr. Schtuppe’s finest hour. That would be “wanton” which he pronounced like “won ton.” The delicious Chinese dumpling often served in soup at the Pacific Rim’s finest eating establishments. That’s why Sam Hellerman and I will sometimes refer to a sexy girl as a Won Ton Woman.)