"Hazard" by Frances O'Roark Dowell

This is not my usual fare. Not being an angry teenager myself, I don't usually read books about angry teenagers, and almost never read books where almost the only person we ever see is an angry teenager.

The book is basically a character study of the titular character, Hazard (named that because of backstory reasons). Apparently he made an illegal tackle while playing football, which led his coach to believe he has anger management issues and take him off the team to send him to a psychologist. It's structured in the form of emails (often sarcastic) to the psychologist, attachments to those emails, and occasionally text conversations with other people.

There is exactly zero normal narration in this book, which means that the reader sort of finds things out about Haz along with the psychologist. Noteworthy things include what happened to his dad (all we know at the beginning is something is very wrong with him) and... yeah, that's pretty much the big mystery. Also, whether or not Haz actually has anger management issues or whether the tackle incident was just a fluke.

I think the one thing missing from this story is Jesus. Both Haz and |his dad| would have benefited immensely just from knowing that God still loves them no matter what happens or what bad choices they've made. Come to think of it, Haz's younger brother would also benefit just from having the solid structure of rules like the Ten Commandments in place to mean he can't just do whatever he wants. (The little brother seems to be under the impression that as long as nobody stops him, anything he does is fine.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T skirting the line of T15+ for some language and just general maturity level.

Aaaaaaaand... 4 stars. On the low side of 4 stars, but it was good enough that I'll give it 4 despite the gaping Jesus-shaped hole in the middle of it.

(Endnote: On the cover, the author's name is styled "frances o'roark dowell", no capitals. I debated doing that with the title of this post, too, but realized it would just look like I didn't care enough to do the capitalization. Or like I didn't know enough to do the capitalization. It would have been dumb.)