YA Book Tour- North Dakota

Next stop on the YA book tour is North Dakota with Gary Paulsen's The Beet Fields.

A sixteen year old boy with a less than ideal home life, both parents are alcoholics.  Runs away to find a better life. He begins his new life working the beet fields of North Dakota with the migrant Mexican workers. He moves on to different things, and eventually ends up working at a traveling carnival.

In each new experience he learns different life lessons about kindness, family, the ways of the world, and lust.

This book starts out with possible one of the most skin crawling scenes.  The boy's mother gets into bed with him and basically attempts to have sex with him.  After that, it is no wonder he left.

The book never names the main character.  The entire boy he is just called the boy, while every other character gets a name.  It hard to establish a bond with a character with no name, especially because it is not even written in first person.  The way the story is written and how it keeps calling him the boy makes the book feel like an anthropologist's observations on his life.  The book kind of ends very abruptly, and I wonder just a little whatever happened to the boy.

In other news, I officially only have 10 books left to read on the United States of YA book tour.  I will probably post the updated map sometime tomorrow.

Currently Reading:
Go Big or Go Home
by Will Hobbs