Scrawl: A Novel
Written by Mark Shulman
Narrated by Mark Deakins and Kimberly Farr
4/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
I know what you think. You think I'm fixable, don't you? You want to fix the bad guy. You don't know the half of it.
Tod Munn is a bully. He's tough, but times are even tougher. The wimps have stopped coughing up their lunch money. The administration is cracking down. Then to make things worse, Tod and his friends get busted doing something bad. Something really bad.
Lucky Tod must spend his daily detention in a hot, empty room with Mrs. Woodrow, a no-nonsense guidance counselor. He doesn't know why he's there, but she does. Tod's punishment: to scrawl his story in a beat-up notebook. He can be painfully funny and he can be brutally honest. But can Mrs. Woodrow help Tod stop playing the bad guy before he actually turns into one . . . for real?
Mark Shulman
Mark Shulman has been a camp counselor, a radio announcer, a maitre d' in a fancy restaurant, a New York City tour guide, and a creative advertising guy. He's written many books about many things--sharks, storms, robots, palindromes, gorillas, dodo birds, Star Wars, Ben Franklin, how to hide stuff, how to voodoo your enemies, and how to make a video from start to finish. He's written picture books for Oscar de la Hoya (the boxer) and Shamu (the whale). Mark is from Rochester and Buffalo, New York, but he has lived in New York City for so very long that he tawks like he's from da Bronx. So do his kids. His wife Kara, a grade school reading specialist, has perfect diction.
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Reviews for Scrawl
44 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tod Munn is a bully and this is his story. Forced to keep a journal as punishment for school vandalism, Tod recounts one month of his life. The author is careful to show --never tell-- acute details of Tod's impoverished life: grinding povery, a distracted/neglectful mother, low self-esteem, and more. Tod reluctantly gets drawn into helping a school play behind the scenes and as he problem solves and makes things happen, he subtly begins to feel differently about himself and his world. The transformation is slow but believable. Kudos to author Shulman for a tale seldom told and even less frequently heeded. Other benes: sympathetic teachers, an endorsement for being smart, and no romance.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I hope to add more to this later but for now there was a lot more in Tod's story, in terms of human nature and society than Tod recognized. The combination of cynicism and optimism really struck me.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A bully reveals himself through daily journal entries. Interesting and perceptive.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tod has a reputation as a bully, a criminal, and a loser, but there’s a lot more to him than that. Through two months of detentions (punishment for a pretty serious crime, but I’ll let him tell you about that) with his guidance counselor, Tod writes out his entire story, from what he’s currently working on to what got him into the situation he’s currently in. He might not want you to know it, but there’s more to this bully than what you see on the surface.
A good 8th-grade read. Theoretically it's an anti-bullying book, but Tod isn't really much of a bully. He's intimidating, and yes, he demands money from weaker kids, but he never intentionally hurts anyone. He's book-smart and street-smart. He has skills (he can sew) that he'd be mortified if anyone know about. I don't know if it really fits into an Anti-Bullying theme, exactly, except insofar as it reminds readers that there's always something more to people than a first impression. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5While the main character, Tod, is likeable, he immediately loses credibility as a bully and tough guy when he says he is not going to do something and then ends up doing it in the ensuing sentence. The only thing he had going for him was that he wasn't a snitch, and in the end, he didn't even have that.I found it wholly frustrating to deal with the discredited narrator, and for kids living in tough circumstances like the protagonist, I fear the story will ring hollow. To me, the situations all felt like a very watered down version of real life.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great look into the mind of a Teenager. The misunderstandings between adults and teens feed this wonderful story line. Todd is doing his best to keep it together with his friends, who also have problems at home. Well worth the time to read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tod, the typical underachieving class bully and his pals get caught vandalizing school property. Instead of a punishment that he would expect, Tod spends his after-school detention writing in a notebook for Mrs. W. His only task is to write about anything and takes full of advantage of his task by sarcastic and smart-aleck work. As the story continues, the reader learns about Tod’s unfortunate home life and sees his troublesome actions as a way of dealing with his pain. As expected, Tod begins to change his attitude; getting involved in school and changing his bully tendencies. This almost bully liberation story is predictable yet heartwarming to read. A good choice for reluctant readers alike, Scrawl is a great edition in any middle school or high school library.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A first novel for the author. Tod is a bully in his high school, and has received an unusual detention: he must stay after school with his guidance counselor and write in a journal every day until the counselor agrees his sentence is complete. This is the result. He writes about what goes on in school and at home. While he is obviously quite poor, he doesn't seem abused (maybe somewhat neglected), nor does he seem very angry. Nevertheless, he writes about his bad his home life is but I've read about a lot worse. He's supposedly extremely smart and gets great grades, even though he doesn't seem to do much work and tries hard to look like he doesn't care. It's all a little too clean to be believable, and the speed with which he opens up in his journal really doesn't ring true. Through the course of the book he becomes intrigued with a girl who's an artist and is putting on a play that she wrote. She asks if his mother (a seamstress) would create the costumes, and he agrees but creates them himself after stealing from the drop off box for a thrift store. Meanwhile, friction is developing between him and his close friends, which all comes to a head at the end of the novel.