What readers think of Man and Boy, plus links to write your own review.

I didn't really enjoy reading this book much as it was quite boring. I didn't find it at all moving and very rarely was it funny. It is written well but just wasn't interesting enough for me to enjoy.

Iain McCorquodale
I was already in the middle of another book, when I picked up my copy of Man and Boy. As an ex-pat Brit in Canada, I was especially looking forward to Tony Parson's exploration of the New Lad as new parent. So, I gave in to temptation and curiosity and sampled a few pages in advance of sitting down to read it properly. It was looking promising until I hit this sentence: "The trunk was smaller than a supermarket cart". OK! It's a British book, by a British author and set in Britain with British characters who drive British cars and shop at British supermarkets. When you go grocery shopping you use a shopping trolley and then take the groceries back to the car and put them in the boot.
Ye Gods! Has the whole thing been bowdlerised in that way? I suspect it has and I only hope it doesn't render the whole book unreadable. Do all US publishing houses do this? I knew that they'd done it to the Harry Potter books and it's almost defensible on the grounds of making it accessible to children who won't have had exposure to the cultural differences. (Personally, I don't buy that argument, but I can see that it may have some merit.) This is different. Do they think that readers will be so baffled by the different terminolgy that the book will be indecipherable without these amendments? It's difficult to see this as anything less than cultural arrogance and disdain for their readers.