Omar Odd is the kid who sits quietly in the back of the classroom with his headphones on. He is the kid who is always picked last for every team he tries to be apart of. He is the kid who's just searching for a little bit of peace and quiet, in a world full of chaotic noise. Omar Odd is a new transfer high school student to the town of Ridgewood. He prefers to live the life of an outsider, but even outsiders find an in crowd. As Omar grows into young adulthood he finds that his life is a series of trial and error. More often than not, he finds himself on the error side of things. With wittiness, luck, questionable judgment, and the help of new found friends, Omar attempts to navigate the road of life while avoiding oncoming traffic. These are his victories, his defeats, but most importantly, his truths. These are, The Oddball Chronicles.
This book was sent to me by the author in exchange for an honest review.
I was
contacted by the author and provided a digital copy of the book in exchange for
an honest review.
The
Oddball Chronicles are about new kid Omar Odd and his high school flubs, social
media storms, and basically being 17 in America.
I like the odd ball chronicles. This book was
instantly intriguing to me as a Librarian because I can think of about about 4
different types of readers I can give this book to. We meet Omar, learn a bit
about his past, and run straight into conflict before we know what’s happening.
While
Omar is presented to us as a quiet kid who likes to fly under the radar and
avoid crowds, it doesn’t take long before he’s broken the internet and starting
news worth national debate over his school presentation, (that was presumably
recorded by some kid from the class) on Christopher Columbus. In his speech,
Omar, deviates from the information in the class textbook and explains not only
did Christopher Columbus “discover” America, he stole land, slaughtered and/or
enslaved those native to the country, and apparently was on board with the
child sex trade??? (which is news to me and I’m going to look it up asap).
The
conflict that Omar’s speech created was pretty indicative of what we see almost
every day on the news and peppered throughout Social Media, I just wish we
could have gone deeper down that rabbit hole. We were told that Omar’s speech
sparked videos made by others, 100,000 views, and goodness knows how many
comments, but I think we readers could have connected more with Omar during
this backlash if we could have seen more of what he saw. Then we go to the
school, and the parents reaction, to the schools reaction, was pretty
confusing. That whole moment of the book was a bit touch and go for me, it felt
like there were paragraphs missing, but I
really liked what was there.
We
migrate away from Christopher Columbus and Omar is simply trying to exist in
the world and finally meets some friends! There is a motley crew of three boys
and a girl, and crazy shenanigans that make you forget they’ve only knew each
other for a few hours. I liked “The Crew” as they called themselves, but I’d love
to see more of them, figure out who they are as individuals. Right now we have
Thiago the party kid, Russ the quiet kid, Zuri the gamer girl, and Kaz the
outspoken leader. I hope that as the chronicles continue, this new friendship
builds, and they get in more trouble because it was a hilarious hot mess.
I would
also like to shout out one of my favorite lines from the book because the
imagery is just darn beautiful. “As Kaz ended his sentence I watched all of my
hopes and dreams take a nosedive out of the sky and explode into heartbroken
pieces of shrapnel.” Our author really knows how to paint a picture doesn’t he!
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