Reviews for Joe Speedboat

The average rating for Joe Speedboat based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-27 00:00:00 Chester Evans THANK THE HEAVENS I FINALLY FINISHED IT. *clears throat* Okay, so a lot of people recommended this to me and I honestly do not understand why. I struggled reading this SO much. The first half I just found boring as hell, and after that it did pick up but I still kinda hated it. I suppose a lot of praise for this book is because the narrator is disabled, which, you know, GREAT! Diversity! Except I fucking despise his character. And I mean sure, very noble to have a disabled protagonist but other than that this book is full of racist and sexist bullshit. Like there's not really any explicit racism, but every single character of colour is described as being exotic and otherworldly, and then the oh-so-desirable, exotically beautiful South-African girl is still somehow blonde and white? But she has the good-old African hindquarters, of course. And don't even get me started about the way women are written in this book. The female characters in this book are portrayed as prizes. As beautiful little treasure that the dudes can be angsty about not possessing. And not because, in fact, women aren't fucking posessions, but because, on most occasions, they are already somebody else's posession. At one point in this book, the protagonists love interest is LITERALLY referred to as an object. So this had me eyerolling all the way through, but then it got even worse when this book started dealing with rape and abuse in one of the most gross and insensitive ways I've experienced in fiction. I'm talking ridicule, slut-shaming and full-blown victim-blaming, among others by the protagonist, and although there is one character who doesn't agree with this bullshit, which gave me just the tiniest sliver of hope, he ends up changing his mind? BASICALLY THIS BOOK MADE ME VERY ANGRY. GOODBYE.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-27 00:00:00 David Williams Normally I'm not such a great fan of 'boys books', like 'Tom Sawyer', 'Kees de Jongen' or even 'Le Grand Meaulnes', but I confess that I appreciated this one. Wieringa brings so much more than a funny coming of age-story. He draws a rather marginal, Dutch community (a small catholic village, on a river, fascist past included), but he also opens up to the wide world (Papa Africa). The great hero of the story, Joe Speedboot, keeps his mystery till the end; his appeal is that he seems to dwell in another dimension and so transcends his relatively marginal origin. Fortunately Wieringa did not make this story telling Fransje Hermans into a pitiful character; at the end Fransje knows very well how poor things are for him. And finally, the language and style of this book is constantly surprising and very imaginative; Wieringa really is a "word-artist". I only have some reservations about the female characters in this book: as in other 'boys' books they get a rather negative image.