The Gifted, the Talented and Me by William Sutcliffe
“Perhaps I did belong in a gifted and talented school after all, my personal aptitude being a talent for blending into the background.”
Fifteen-year-old Sam isn't special. He's not a famous vlogger, he's never gone viral, and he doesn't want to be the Next Big Thing. What he likes most is chatting to his friends and having a bit of a kick about.
None of which was a problem until Dad got rich and Mum made the whole family move to London. Now Sam is being made to go to the North London Academy for the Gifted and Talented, where every student is too busy planning Hollywood domination or starting alt-metal psychedelica crossover bands or making clothes out of bathmats to give someone as normal as him the time of day. Can Sam navigate his way through the weirdness and find a way to be himself?
Aaaah yes. The coming-of-age novel. The bildungsroman. There is nothing particularly path-breaking about the plot, but my god the writing.
Honestly, Sam is just so insanely relatable. Even though I’m the kind of person who has had “you’re so talented!” drilled into their head since childhood, I found so much in common with Sam ( exhibit 345: “He was wearing glasses with frames so chunky and hideous they could only be expensive and highly fashionable,”).
Sam is awkward, and he’s hardly ever able to say the right thing at the right time. He’s not exactly a social butterfly, and he feels woefully inadequate compared to his extremely talented classmates (“Sometimes the only way to salvage your dignity is to walk away. Ideally, you’d do this before your dignity has been battered to a soggy, flattened pulp, but timing was never my strong point,”). Still, he’s witty and oh-so-honest. Though he gets frustrated and makes mistakes, he’s actually a great person at heart. (“Given the choice between being constantly irritated by your siblings and not even knowing where they were, irritation, I realized, was preferable.”)
The book makes Sam feel real through his eerily accurate stream of consciousness. Not to say that his thoughts sound like mine, but they sound absolutely real (“The phrase ‘I’ll show them’ seemed to be rattling around somewhere in my brain, though who they were, and what it was I’d be showing them, I had no idea,”). Sam’s childish and hilarious thoughts are balanced out with some slyly profound statements, especially about his family.
Overall, the storyline is sweet and simple, but it’s the snarky and fresh writing that really makes Sam and his predicaments pop off the page.
Fifteen-year-old Sam isn't special. He's not a famous vlogger, he's never gone viral, and he doesn't want to be the Next Big Thing. What he likes most is chatting to his friends and having a bit of a kick about.
None of which was a problem until Dad got rich and Mum made the whole family move to London. Now Sam is being made to go to the North London Academy for the Gifted and Talented, where every student is too busy planning Hollywood domination or starting alt-metal psychedelica crossover bands or making clothes out of bathmats to give someone as normal as him the time of day. Can Sam navigate his way through the weirdness and find a way to be himself?
Honestly, Sam is just so insanely relatable. Even though I’m the kind of person who has had “you’re so talented!” drilled into their head since childhood, I found so much in common with Sam ( exhibit 345: “He was wearing glasses with frames so chunky and hideous they could only be expensive and highly fashionable,”).
Sam is awkward, and he’s hardly ever able to say the right thing at the right time. He’s not exactly a social butterfly, and he feels woefully inadequate compared to his extremely talented classmates (“Sometimes the only way to salvage your dignity is to walk away. Ideally, you’d do this before your dignity has been battered to a soggy, flattened pulp, but timing was never my strong point,”). Still, he’s witty and oh-so-honest. Though he gets frustrated and makes mistakes, he’s actually a great person at heart. (“Given the choice between being constantly irritated by your siblings and not even knowing where they were, irritation, I realized, was preferable.”)
The book makes Sam feel real through his eerily accurate stream of consciousness. Not to say that his thoughts sound like mine, but they sound absolutely real (“The phrase ‘I’ll show them’ seemed to be rattling around somewhere in my brain, though who they were, and what it was I’d be showing them, I had no idea,”). Sam’s childish and hilarious thoughts are balanced out with some slyly profound statements, especially about his family.
Overall, the storyline is sweet and simple, but it’s the snarky and fresh writing that really makes Sam and his predicaments pop off the page.
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