Word Nerd, by Susin Nielsen

I’ll admit it, despite a couple of English degrees, I’m a pretty lousy Scrabble player. Like anyone who’s ever been disembowelled by the use of a word like “QAT”  or a well-placed prefix, I realized long ago that lacking Scrabble strategy is the quickest route to failure and constant gloating from your roommate’s dad.

But I love words, and I love nerds, so when I espied Susin Nielsen’s Word Nerd, I felt like I’d just thrown a ‘Q’ down on a triple letter score. Ambrose is a twelve-year-old social outcast who is bullied to the point of near-death-by-peanut, and pulled from regular school by his overprotective mom. He turns to home schooling, but quickly gets bored of long days in the apartment, and looks for new ways for human interaction.  These include scoring invites to dinner with the Greek couple upstairs, trying to befriend their ex-con son, and eventually, joining the neighbourhood Scrabble club.

Ambrose is the kind of kid lots of a  nerds could identify with — he’s a bit of a fashion victim (I wore Northern Getaway duds longer than it was cool I think), he has a propensity for putting his foot in his mouth, and he’s not so popular in the schoolyard. And while the bullying in this book was fairly cookie cutter, it was still realistic, and I liked that Nielsen didn’t look for an easy solution — there was no befriending the bully or somehow becoming more popular.

And as much as Word Nerd is about embracing who you are and what you’re good at (not unlike a certain group of Gleeks that are taking television by storm), I also appreciated that Nielsen didn’t go for a straight up you’re-perfect-with-as-you-are message. Lose the purple cords. Think before you talk.  Whether we like it or not, growing up isn’t always about complete independence, and sometimes if you really want to fit in, you have to make a few concessions (otherwise I would fully wear my pyjamas to work every day).

I sometimes wished that Ambrose’s mom wasn’t such a paranoid mess, but I felt Nielsen gave a well-founded reason for that. On the other hand, the relationship he develops with Cosmo could reek of after-school-special, but their banter is genuine and their relationship rang true.

To wrap up:  Sharp, observant, and often funny, Word Nerd is a meangingful depiction of the painful pre-teen years, and likely to resonate beyond its target audience. And while YA shouldn’t have to teach something, and certainly shouldn’t pound in its pedantry, here the  rules of Scrabble were a nice reminder of some of the rules we live by: nobody likes a sore winner or a sore loser, work hard and you’ll improve, and most of all, especially in the teenage years,  just try to make the most of the jumble you’re given.