48 Shades of Brown

by Nick Earls

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618452958
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/07/2004
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.71(d)
Lexile:	790L (what's this?)
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Nick Earls lives in Brisbane, Australia, where he writes for both children and adults. His previous Graphia book, 48 Shades of Brown, won Australia’s Children’s Book Council Book of the Year for Older Readers. It also received the following praise:

Read an Excerpt

By eight-thirty it’s getting quite crowded.
Jacq, who at seven-thirty was pacing the empty verandahs and smoking a lot, now has champagne in one hand, wine in the other and several conversations going at once. Naomi is working on a spur-of-the- moment punch in the kitchen. Burns is gripping a beer as though it’s a mother’s hand, and looking even more out of place than me.
Phil Borthwick turns up in a tie and Burns gives me a look that suggests he feels a little better about himself. Phil (and I admire this) seems to have no idea that he’s the only person in a tie, and says, with some glee, Great, dancing, when he works out what’s going on in the loungeroom, and why the furniture is all outside.
At least he hasn’t tried anything silly with food. He’s brought a carton of full-strength beer, and there will be plenty of people here who think this more than makes up for the tie.
I don’t actually drink it myself, he says sheepishly to Jacq and me. I’ve got an enzyme thing, so I can’t really touch alcohol. But I thought I’d bring it for the party.
Thanks, Phil, Jacq says, already touching alcohol as though she and it are at least close friends, and with a smile that I haven’t seen before. A lazy, uncomplicated smile, a drinking smile, buckling under the weight of its own bonhomie. But you’d have just the one, wouldn’t you? It’s a party.

Editorial Reviews

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 —

From the Publisher

Dan's dry, wickedly funny first-person voice chronicles a month of his life as he moves in with his aunt in hometown Brisbane while his parents move to Geneva. Dan is 16, his aunt Jacq 22, and their third housemate-the winsome Naomi-a university student. Unlike his parents' reliably neat household, this place is casual: beer is offered freely, Naomi has audible sex with her boyfriend in the middle of the afternoon, and Dan's on his own for discipline. But Dan is no partier, just a wry, self-aware virgin pining for Naomi. He memorizes the 48 shades of brown that classify birds, but can't get them to come out of his mouth in suitable ways to attract her. A question about calculus (math) becomes an ongoing musing about Calculus (the Tintin professor) merely because Naomi misunderstands. Hip, sarcastic Jacq is kind underneath; Dan's self-deprecating but smart. Colorfully understated and satisfying-and hilarious. (Fiction. YA)

Kirkus Reviews