About a boy door Nick Hornby

Theme: I think this book is about loneliness, happiness and friendship. The two main persons are helping each other with these problems. Setting: This takes place in London, and it happened in the years 1993/1994. Main Characters - Will, he’s about 35 years old and he doesn’t have a job, because his father wrote years ago a famous Christmas song. Will thinks he’s a really cool guy. - Marcus, he’s 12 years old and he’s a bit strange. Well, that’s what children from the same age think, because he’s wearing weird clothes and that kind of things. He just moved with his mother to London when she broke up with her boyfriend. Summary: Will and Marcus meet each other at a picnic from the SPAT (Single Parents Alone Together). Will is acting like he’s a single father, because he thinks that’s an easy way to get dates with single mothers. Marcus is coming whit a friend of his mother, Suzie. Marcus’s mother, Fiona, is since a few weeks depressed. Will likes Suzie, so that’s why Will is spending that afternoon with Marcus and Suzie. At the end of the afternoon Will brings Marcus and Suzie home, but when they arrive at Marcus’s house his mother has to go to the hospital. She has tried to kill herself. Marcus feels alone, and he finds out where Will lives, and sometimes he goes to Will’s place after school. There he finds out that Will doesn’t has a child. From that moment on he comes more at Will’s place. Will doesn’t like that at all at the beginning, but he gets used to it, and after a few times he likes the visits of Marcus. After a few times Marcus asks Will to take his mother and him out, because he thinks that his mother will be happy again when she has a new boyfriend. Actually Will doesn’t want to do that, because he doesn’t know Fiona very well, and she just tried to commit suicide, but finally he takes Fiona and Marcus out. Fiona knows of course about Will’s “son”, because Suzie had told her, but Marcus tells that Will doesn’t has a child. Since then Fiona doesn’t wants Marcus visits Will again, but Marcus keeps visiting Will. Marcus tells Will about school, and that he doesn’t has any friends, and so Will decides that he’s going to help Marcus with new shoes and new CD’s with the “right” music. Of course Fiona gets to know those things, but she doesn’t say Marcus can’t go anymore at Will’s place. Marcus gets knew friends too. One of his new friends is Ellie, a fifteen years old girl, who thinks she’s the biggest fan of Nirvana. Then it becomes Christmas, and Marcus’s mother is doing better now. Marcus invites Will to celebrate Christmas with them, and so is Will celebrating Christmas with Marcus, Fiona, Marcus’s dad Clive and his girlfriend Lindsey. At New Years Eve Will goes to a party, and there he meets Rachel. He falls in love with her, and here he’s also telling that he’s a father, but now he tells he’s Marcus’s father. Rachel tells that she has a son from the same age, and she invites Will and Marcus for a meeting at her place. Marcus and Ali, Rachel’s son, aren’t really good friends, but finally Will and Rachel are having a relationship. Fiona is getting depressed again, she’s crying all day. It looks a lot like how the situation was before she tried to commit suicide, and that scares Marcus. Then Fiona tells Marcus that his father had an accident, and she thinks that Marcus has to go to Cambridge, because Clive asked that. Marcus doesn’t wants to go alone, so he goes together with Ellie. Ellie isn’t really happy when they leave, because Nirvana-singer Kurt Cobain killed himself. She’s very unhappy about that, and when she sees a big picture of him in a store she breaks the window in her anger, because she drank to much, and Ellie and Marcus had to go to the police office. Clive and Lindsey are coming to pick them up, but Marcus is really impolite against Lindsey, and there he gets a fight with his father. Clive’s accident wasn’t that worse, but Marcus thought so. A few hours later arrived Fiona, Will and Ellie’s mother, and when everything is managed the go back to London. Finally Rachel and Will are breaking up, because they’re too different. Ali and Marcus have becoming friends.
Personal opinion: I liked the book very much. It was very funny, because one part, the day Marcus and Will met, was called in the book “Dead Duck Day”, because Marcus killed a duck when he tried to give him a piece (a whole sandwich) of bread. This part of the book came back in the whole story, meant as a joke. Not everything was funny, of course, because suicide isn’t a funny thing, but that’s what the book makes interesting, I think, because it’s a mix of serious and funny things.