Dodgeball High: Review

Dodgeball High by Bradley Sands
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Training you was a huge waste of time. I could have been doing something more productive...like picking my nose."

The above line is burned into my memory, extremely hilarious. Bradley Sands finds productivity in the most unexpected places. And he finds redemption where others find only repulsion.

I finished this almost exactly one month ago. It took me this long to write the review. On one hand, the wackiness of his writing seems to defy the quest for redemptive value. On the other hand, nobody has me turning the pages like Bradley Sands.

This is the story of Justin Lucas, the new kid at a very unusual high school, Lungville High, where dodge-ball is at the heart of the curriculum. However, this oddness is just the tip of the iceberg. This story also gives new meaning to detention, which is more of a psychological training ground than punishment.

I think Bradley Sands may have pushed the material farther than it needed to go, in terms of twists and turns and escalating action and stakes. Yet, he taps into the nearly universal experiences of high school, love, the need to belong, survival, and the need to be taken seriously.

Early on, the book seems to be autobiographical, in my estimation. Justin, the protagonist says something serious and others misread his seriousness and laugh. Justin is unintentionally hilarious to others, and he learns to be relatively proud of this; I believe this is similar to what Bradley Sands has experienced in the past. Most of us have some of these moments, but some of us have more than others. I've had these moments too. You try to write horror (or something), but, when it's read aloud, people laugh their asses off. However, as the book progresses, these elements get overshadowed by much more preposterous developments.

There are bodybuilders, restaurants where cows are slaughtered for diners' satisfaction, nuclear bombs, erections, serial killers, and so much more in this sandy cocktail brought to you by the connoisseur of crazy, Bradley Sands.

Bradley Sands' story unfortunately suffers from an inherently sexist perspective, a teenage boy who heavily objectifies girls. This closed first-person approach will have feminists cringing, and this is nothing new for Sands or Bizarro fiction. However, I'd love to see Sands write a book that is satisfactory to feminists. He claims to have run out of creative gas lately. Well, I challenge him to write a book featuring women protagonists whose conversations and thoughts rarely involve men as a focus. Bradley Sands' inner woman yearns for expression.

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