Cut to the Twisp

Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: by far one of the funniest and best written books i've ever read. payne does a great job of getting into the mind of a 14 year old. the book flows great, with so much going on at one time, much like real life, yet with adventures that could never be imagined by a normal mundane mind. seriously a great book.

Rating:
Summary: For hardcore fans only
Review: The format of this book is completely ludicrous: it's basically everything cut from "Youth in Revolt" ... up on the page with no context. Everything from two sentences to two pages of cut text is in here introduced only by a "from page X, after words "xxx xxx" in literally hundreds of little excerpts. Imagine if you made a film out of all the scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor -- it makes about that much sense. The only way to truly make sense of this mess is to re-read your copy of "Youth in Revolt" and use this as a companion (which would mean switching books every other page). HOWEVER, if you have read YIR recently, you can somehow make sense of things and it's not totally confusing. And, thankfully, most of the passages function more as stand-alone amusing little anecdotes that were cut for obvious reasons, since they did little to drive the plot. Many, fortunately, don't suffer too much from a lack of context. Thankfully, Payne's wit is enough to make this an enjoyable read for hardcore fans. Be that as it may, the format is just generally annoying, dropping you into situations for a minute or five minutes and you never know quite where you are. Anyone but C.D. Payne cultists should steer clear.

Rating:
Summary: Really rounds out the characters
Review: Youth in Revolt must be read in its uncut entirety to really be appreciated. In this book, characters do things you never expected them to do just by reading Youth in Revolt. Things also make much more sense, and there is even an allusion to a cut part in the sequel, Revolting Youth. However, there will be some shuffling between this book and YIR which is kind of irritating.