Absolute Joey

by Judith Boswell

Joey Brooks is a high school sophomore by day and an alternative video blogger by night. He shares his family dramas, school traumas, make up tips, and heartbreaks with the world. His latest crush, Myles, is a possibly straight classmate in a long line of hetero heartbreakers. Myles’ closest friends are a group that has tortured Joey his whole life, but that doesn’t stop Joey from forming a fragile relationship.
When Myles disappears after a fatal car accident everyone assumes it is a typical adolescent runaway case, but Joey is convinced something more sinister is happening in his high school.
Joey’s mother is a local news anchor and her boyfriend is a police officer, so Joey has become accustomed to keeping sensitive information to himself. Should he make an exception this time?

336 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2014

Reviews

[Carroll Boswell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really well drawn characters, excellent humor, engaging plot

[Debbie · Rating 1 out of 5]

The storyline sounded interesting. The introduction to the characters was promising. But then... that was it. No character development, no real plot, no motives... just bits and pieces of disjointed information with no follow through. Characters didn't grow or learn. No explanations offered (or even questioned) regarding the car accident (why didn't the driver stop? why were those characters in the car together in the first place?). There were so many paths that could have been taken with multiple characters and all were simply...dropped. I felt as though the author had a great outline of a story and characters (beginning and middle) but simply had no idea how to tie them together or develop (or conclude) any of them, so just kept throwing words at the page until the word count showed it was time to end the story. The conclusion was terrible and I was left with more questions than answers, but I simply didn't care enough about any of the characters for that to matter. By that time, I was just glad it was over.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was alright. The story had a lot of potential but fell flat in a lot of areas, I felt. The same with the characters. I thought, at first, that the characters were very interesting and set up to be non-typical trope-centric characters. Instead they also seemed to fall flat, eventually succumbing to stereotypical tropes for their 'type' of character... when they could have been so much more. For the most part I went back and forth trying to decide if I actually enjoyed this book or not. In the end it just wasn't my cup of tea. I suppose many of the early set ups in the novel led me to believe there was going to be a very interesting ending. Instead it sort of felt like something thrown in at the very end because the author copped out at the last minute or perhaps just didn't know how to wrap the story up. That isn't to say I was dissatisfied with the direction the ending was going in... everything just sort of ended up very anti-climatic towards the end of the book.