Number 8 by Anna Fienberg
Much to my surprise, I enjoyed this book very much. It’s a light read and very difficult to categorize because it touches on many, many themes. It is a book about life at school, an book about finding friends, a book about becoming yourself, an adventure story, and about the importance of family. If I ticked all those categories on the blog, there would be no space left for anything else.
Jackson, the narrator, is a young teenager barely managing the stress of daily life. His fascination for numbers borders on obsessive/compulsive. To his mind the number 8 is perfection and number 7 is trouble. So it is safe to make friends with the girl who lives across the road in number 68, but that car with the license plate reading 777 is danger. Jackson has problems with a bully at school and his Mum, a professional singer, can’t seem to hold a job, or even stay in one place very long at all.
Year 7 holds all kinds of stresses for Jackson, and the reader is included in all of them. We share his first kiss. We are there when he rescues the primary school boy from bullies. And it is this very immediacy that keeps us reading caught up in Jackson’s story as though it were our own.
