Title: The literary equivalent of a snack ...
Product review: ... pleasant enough but not much substance.Yet another "coming-to-grips-with-being-gay" story, "The Trouble Boy" should keep you entertained for the duration of a plane journey but you're likely to forget it pretty soon afterwards.Tom Dolby's style is uniformly journalistic throughout, i.e. punchy, and at times even quite amusing. This enables him to sustain the pace but somewhat prevents the characters from being much more than cardboard cut-outs. The flash-back to the university episode did not gel with the rest of the novel and managed to be artificial instead of adding depth.Some readers might also treat "The Trouble Boy" as a "roman a clefs" and engage in a spot who is who game that may add piquancy to this otherwise rather bland concoction.
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