'The Universe vs. Alex Woods' - too much for almost-11 yo DS1?

[PacificDogwood]

I've just finished it and really liked it.

DS1 is a bright spark, he reads well ahead of his age and I am sure he'd love all the musings on the brain and the universe.
Otoh, the 'worst word in the English language' features once (as does a fair bit of other swearing) and it deals with assisted suicide.

What are your thoughts?

Anybody?

Any and all opinions welcome.

My son read and loved it at 12. My daughter was 11. Lovely,lovely book. I teach English and will be recommending it to the 11-14 year olds.

Oh thank you .

Glad to hear your children enjoyed it - I know I did.

My mum let me read anything - if anything "came up" for me then we would talk about it, and she loved reading and always talked about books with me anyway. So if I'd read something like this and been bothered or had thoughts or misunderstood about something like suicide, then we'd have talked about it together. Did me much more good than trying to pretend that difficult subjects don't exist.

Re: swearing, I was simply taught that it's rude to swear in front of someone who hasn't sworn in front of you yet. When giving him the book and describing it/what he might like about it, you might want to remind him of this rule, but then the swearing might be something you discuss about it together afterwards - did swearing make you more/less sympathetic to any of the characters? People usually swear when they're angry - in what other ways did characters express their anger? Did the dialogue sound natural, like someone would actually say out loud?

If you want to make him feel really really grown up and if you never normally allow swearing from him at all, you could have a conversation about the swearing in the book where you deliberately and explicitly announce that it is ok for the duration of this conversation only to actually say out loud the words you are talking about. So then you could say e.g. "I thought that when Billy said fuck he just said it without thinking, every other word like it wasn't even a swear word. But when Ben said shit it was really powerful because he hardly ever swears at all."

Yes, I read all sorts of things from my dad's library and seem to have escapes unscathed - I think.
I sometimes worry that I am too laid back about what they read, hence this thread. It was more the assisted suicide theme than the swearing that gave me pause. It is very well handled, I think, although obviously in favour of it being a valid choice to make (which I happen to agree with, but not everybody will).

As an adult I love the book. I would be less worried about the swearing and more concerned that it is quite sad (e.g. when Alex is being bullied and when his friend finally dies).

I would say it would raise a lot of possible issues eg about euthanasia but that's ok if you can talk them through together.

Yes, the bullying scenes are very powerful too - and probably closer to a school boy's heart than mine now; good point.

It is very sad when Mr Peterson died, but so well handled I thought.
Hm. I think I'll suggest it to him.