Hair in All The Wrong Places by Andrew Buckley

Genre: Young Adult, Middle Grade, Fantasy, Supernatural

Pages: 231

Published June 7th 2016 by Month9books

What has he done?

What’s happening to him?

And what on Earth is that smell?

For Colin Strauss, puberty stinks. Blackouts, hallucinations, and lapses in memory are the perils of growing up werewolf.

Worse than that, Colin worries he might have had something to do with the recent attacks on the townspeople. He may have eaten a person. It doesn’t matter that it’s someone he doesn’t particularly like. What kind of boy goes around eating people?

Foolishly, all Colin can think about is how Becca Emerson finally kissed him for the first time. Yep, hormones are afoot. Yikes!

But girls will have to wait. Collin better get himself under control before someone else ends up hurt or worse . . . dead.

I absolutely enjoyed reading this book, it was comical, mysterious and entertaining. Andrew Buckley did well to blend in the awkwardness of a pubescent teen who has self-esteem issues. As if that isn’t a hard enough period in life, add in a dose of werewolf-itis and you’ve got a pretty disastrous entry into teenhood.

Colin Strauss is a nobody, he’s a dork, awkward and nothing to make one take a second look at him. He’s been bounced around from family member to family member which means he’s moved around his fair amount. Now he’s living with his grandmother in Elkwood, she’s blind and creepy. She also makes no qualms about her distaste for him.

He’s constantly bullied in school to the point one day he’s beaten and fairly humiliated in the alley nearby school and it drives him to steal his dead grandfather’s car and try to leave town. Except the powers that be had a different idea and it was then that he was bitten by a mysterious creature.

That mysterious creature just happened to be a werewolf!

From there things become really interesting, a mystery murder pops up and Colin begins to not only experience new changes in his body, but there is a murder that must be unfolded and he cannot remember if it was him or not. The deeper Colin looks the more interesting things he finds out about Elkwood and its citizens, there are many, many secrets involved in this town.

Andrew Buckley creates this quirky little town full of interesting characters, that truly made me laugh out loud. This book was amusing and delightful to read. This would definitely be a fun read for a middle grader with the supernatural elements, mystery and humor tossed into it. Not to mention teen issues on top of it, such as attraction to the opposite sex.

What kept me from giving it a full five stars was that toward the ending it seemed to be prolonged a touch, but when you have an awkward, smart mouthy boy like Colin, it’s not exactly a horrible thing!