48 Shades of Brown - by Nick Earls (Paperback)

About the Book

Australian teenager Dan Bancroft has a choice to make: go to Geneva with his parents for a year, or move into a house with his bass-playing aunt Jacq and her friend Naomi. He chooses Jacq's place, and his life will never be the same.

Book Synopsis

Australian teenager Dan Bancroft had a choice to make: go to Geneva with his parents for a year, or move into a house with his bass-playing aunt Jacq and her friend Naomi. He chose Jacq's place, and his life will never be the same. This action-packed and laugh-out-loud-funny novel navigates Dan's chaotic world of calculus, roommates, birds, and love.

Review Quotes

STARRED REVIEW "With small details about throwing up, basil, Romeo and Juliet, brown birds, postcards, and sex, Earls build a too-true story that neither older young adults nor adults will be able to put down as their smiles become belly laughs that lead them to new perspectives." VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates)

Dan's narration is wry and understatedly funny throughout as he comes face to face with the stretching but still extant limits of his maturation...this is a creative departure from the classic Bildugnsroman in its articulate portrayal of a young man who's starting to realize how much more there is to adulthood that he'd realized or is ready for.
Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Older teens will relish Dan's wry, self-deprecating honesty about attratction, sex (mostly overheard), beer, calculus, and his uproariously funny, earnest search for the kind of guy he wants to be.
Booklist, ALA

Dan is a good kid, and his ruefully observed narration of unrequited love will keep the attention of any boy once persuaded into its pages.
Horn Book

Through Dan's voice, Earls perfectly captures the obsessive, self-conscious, confused state of mind that goes along with adolescence. A vibrant rendition of growing pains.
Publishers Weekly

Dan is a wonderful, complex character. Teen boys - and girls - will find much that they can relate to in this coming-of-age story.
School Library Journal

This Australian coming-of-age novel is both funny and poignant. As Dan fumbles through the process of forming a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, he also learns about making pesto, interpreting Romeo and Juliet, why almost all birds are one of the 48 shades of brown, and why his best course of action is just to be himself.
KLIATT --