Story in Review: Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie by David Lubar

A quirky Young Adult novel, Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie by David Lubar was adorable, heartfelt, and a wonderful picture of what it looks like to make it through your freshman year. Scott Hudson starts his freshman year already feeling behind, and then his parents dump some big news on him at the end of the day: he’s going to be a big brother. In addition to navigating high school, he’s now got to deal with a pregnant mother, a dad who doesn’t always understand him, and the fact that he is crushing hard for a girl he sat next to in kindergarten. It makes for some funny material along the way.

Callie Feyen always has the best book suggestions hidden in her “My Week in Words” posts, especially when it comes to middle grade and YA fiction. I suppose teaching middle school English gives you an edge, huh?

Favorite Quotes:

(please forgive the lack of page numbers, as I read it on my iPad)

“That’s the weird thing about flea markets—books and tools seem to cost about the same amount per pound.”

“He’d broken his nose way back in first grade. It had healed kind of crooked, which made him look tough. Everyone figured he liked to fight. The truth is, he broke it falling off a rocking horse. But that didn’t matter. Once you had a reputation, good or bad, it stayed with you.”

“Would anything be left: of my memories of high school fifteen years from now? It was weird to realize I was going to forget things I hadn’t even experienced yet.”

“Which brings me to my first piece of advice: be careful with big words. People don’t like show-offs.”

“‘What is it? A girl?’ ‘How’d you know?’ He threw a shirt at my head. ‘It’s always a girl. So what’s the problem?’”

“The other team scored eleven times. Final score, 76 to 7. They should have had seventy-seven, but they missed one of the extra points. Not because of our defense. I think their kicker was getting tired.”

“I mean, I was a good reader, but that wasn’t like being a good ballplayer.”

“Don’t ever be afraid to ask for what you want. Nobody can read your mind. People always assume you want the same sort of things they want.”

“There’s something you need to know about the cafeteria. It’s a miniature map of everyone’s social standing.”

“Everyone around me looks so tired, I feel like I’m an extra in a low-budget zombie movie.”

“New Year’s is sort of like starting a new school. You can make all sorts of plans and promises about being better or changing your habits. Then you go on being yourself.”

“As much as I know he’s always within an inch of doing something dangerous, I get the funny feeling he has a set of rules he lives by. It’s just that they aren’t any rules I ever learned.”

“Unlike cars, lives don’t have a way to go in reverse.”

“So there I was, at the last social event of the year, dancing with a great girl. A girl who wasn’t afraid to be herself. And who wasn’t afraid to step away from the safety of her chosen identity. I doubt there were many other kids in the gym—or anywhere else, for that matter—who had the courage to do what [she] had done.”

Why this was a great story? Lubar’s narrator, Scott, is witty, smart, and a genuinely nice guy – even if he is 14 and still trying to figure out just who he is. The material isn’t anything earth-shattering: there’s bullies and girls and teens being teens as in most YA novels, but the way Lubar presents it in the first person diary of a freshman boy lets you follow the drama up close. And of course, by the end, all is well and wonderful and you smile as you lay the book down for the last time.

What could have made it better? At times, Scott seems too self-aware, too smart for a high school boy, let alone a freshman. And maybe this is also the book’s magic: that one young kid is just enough different that he does have some wisdom to pass onto the rest of us – even at 14.

So… have you read Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie? What other books about being a high schooler have you enjoyed?