Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2010
352 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Paperback Original. Losers, now you can get the bad-boy rep the girls find positively irresistible! Unleash your dark side with the Doug Schaffer plan for drug addiction and rehabilitation! (Kids, don't try this at home.)
At sixteen years old, Doug Schaffer knows two things for sure:
1. He is doomed to live in the shadow of his older brother, Trevor, a former high school football star who is stationed in Iraq.
2. Free-spirited Laurilee, the hot ear-piercing girl at the mall, only dates bad boys.
Cue Doug's foolproof plan to tarnish his own unremarkable reputation. The first step is to develop a drug addiction. His mom's too preoccupied with organizing care packages for Mothers Support Our Troops Northwest Oklahoma City Chapter to stop him. Besides, he just needs to get hooked on meth long enough to come back from rehab a totally different person. Someone people notice.
With the help of Trevor’s strung-out former high-school buddy, drug addict Doug has the confidence that loser Doug never mustered. He stays out all night, scores girls, and stands up for himself. Then Trevor unexpectedly returns home with a dark secret of his own, and everything Doug thought was true is shattered. Soon the brothers find a common ground they never knew they shared as they discover the price of pleasing others is the freedom to be yourself.
"This coming-of-age debut about a 16-year-old's attempt to get popular by becoming a drug addict is charming, poignant, and engrossing—to a point." - Publishers Weekly
"Maya Sloan's characters could be deemed purely comic if they weren't so realistic, tender if they weren't so jaded, and heartwarming if their lives weren't so heart-wrenching. All of which makes this a darkly compelling -- possibly controversial -- coming-of-age novel. High Before Homeroom is a wild debut from a brilliant new novelist." - Julianna Baggott, author of The Miss America Family and co-author of Which Brings Me to You
"Here's a confession: I like Doug Schaffer more than I ever liked his idol Dean Moriarty, and I had much more fun reading Maya Sloan's High Before Homeroom than I ever had reading its literary progenitor, On the Road." - Ayelet Waldman, author of Red Hook Road and Bad Mother
This information about High Before Homeroom was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Maya Sloan is an award-winning author with an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Arkansas. High Before Homeroom is her first novel. She was born and raised Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
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