2Much4U

by Vince Ford

Yikes! How is Davin ever going to pay his mum back for destroying her car? The odd job business sounds like a sure-fire winner. It's a great plan that turns into a hilarious an hairy adventure involving wild dogs, a frisky stallion, putrid green sheep and a couple of dodgy characters called Oil and Scuz.

It's too much for anyone to handle!

153 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Born in Eltham, Taranaki, New Zealand - 1970. Vince Ford started his published career by winning the 1998 Tom Fitzgibbon Award for a previously unpublished writer, with 2MUCH4U, which went on to win the 2000 NZ Post Children's Book Award for Junior Fiction and an honour award for a first-time author. This initial success has been followed by the publication of 2 sequel titles to 2MUCH4U, plus a title in the SPORTMAX series of sport-focused stories for the 11-13 year interest level, and more recently with A Handful of Blue - a more dramatic story centered around a small community and a whale stranding, published in 2003. He is now working on a very different project - a trilogy of stories looking at the development of the man as hunter - Chronicles of Stone.

Reviews

[Daniel O'Halloran]

The novel 2MUCH4U was written by Vince Ford, the main character is a boy called Davin Smith. He lives on a farm with his mother and brother as his father passed away in an accident when he rolled his four wheeler. Davin is also quite forgetful which sometimes leads to catastrophe, in this story he left the handbrake off in his Mum’s car and it rolled down the hill and burst into flames. To make matters worse, Davin had forgotten to post the insurance letter weeks earlier, so the car wasn’t insured. Davin felt massively guilty, but he was determined to pay his Mum the money to pay for the car, so when he has to do a school task over the holidays to teach him about managing and earning money, he starts up an odd job service called 2MUCH4U. Davin then spends his summer holidays earning random jobs for people to earn money so he can tell his mum that it was his fault the car burned and soften the blow with money to replace it. I think that the author is trying to show us that even if you make mistakes, if you are determined and willing to put in the work, like Davin was, you can fix them. Maybe things won’t always go according to plan, but you should never give up. I think that Davin was quite a hard working and diligent guy, and that he was lucky that he had such good friends to help him out when he needed it. He was very responsible and not afraid of hard work.

[Miss Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-paced story of teenage decisions, friendship, righting a wrong and "payback" set in a very kiwi setting with good-natured humour and an agreeable ending. It shows the lengths sons go to for their mothers whilst attempting to avoid nasty locals.

[Michaela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Typical life as a young kid in New Zealand love it !!