It doesn’t appear to bother Andy that Dougie is a loser, because Andy and Dougie are best friends.
He is good-looking, athletic (star quarterback, of course), theatrically talented (leading man in all the school’s plays, coincidentally) and smart. But when he isn’t scraping sulfur off matches or glueing tracks together, Dougie is talking to his best friend Andy. He spends his time in his basement building an elaborate model train set out of wooden matches. In fact, some people think he is a bit odd. I have a best friend."Īnd do NOT start reading INVISIBLE if you have to be anywhere important in the next couple of hours.Seventeen-year-old Dougie is a loner. I am scrupulously honest, except for necessary lies. I have never broken a bone, lost a limb, or had an organ removed. I have never skipped school and I have a 3.4 grade point average. His best friend and next door neighbor, the popular Andy Morrow, is both a drama kid and the star quarterback on the football team. In a spectacular and tense piece of writing that recalls my favorite Cormier novel, I AM THE CHEESE, but with the strings pulled even tighter, Pete Hautman has created a disturbingly real character whose troubled life will cause you nightmares.ĭougie is a loner who is thoroughly obsessed with the model train world he has created in the basement, with numbers and order, and with the beautiful Melissa Haverman. I find it troubling that she finds me disturbing, so she must be right. In fact, she thinks that I am troubled and disturbed.
Sometimes he calls me General, just to tease me. Then I say, 'But you can call me General.' Some people find this amusing. "Usually when I meet someone for the first time, I tell them my full and proper name. I think it makes me sound more respectable. Anyway, I'm glad I got named after a general instead of a politician. Since my grandfather's name was George Washington Hanson, I guess I'm related to the father of our country too. He was my grandfather's cousin's great-uncle. Henry Clay was a politician who died before the Civil War. Everyone on my father's side is named after some famous person we are supposedly related to. I am named after Douglas MacArthur, the famous general, who was a second cousin of my father's great-aunt. "My full and proper name is Douglas MacArthur Hanson. Pete Hautman's INVISIBLE is going to make for one hot booktalk. INVISIBLE by Pete Hautman, Simon & Schuster, June 2005, ISBN: 0-6
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