The Misfits by James Howe

The book starts with a group of misfits, there is one chubby boy, a tall girl, a punk rocker, and a possibly homosexual boy and together they are the misfits, a group of kids who do not fit in with their peers. Instead of seeing what other see on them these friends see the good qualities about each other, the qualities people sometimes don’t see because they can’t get past the appearance. The story is told from the point of view of Bobby, the chubby one. He is best friends with Addie, who is the leader of the group. One day Addie comes up with the idea of having the misfits chose a candidate to run for class president so they chose DuShawn, one of the few African American students in the school. She wanted to give a voice to those who didn’t really have one.
I was told that this book was a controversial book and in the first couple of chapters I could understand why it might be considered controversial. Some of the characters in the book I could see parents and administrators having a problem with, especially Joe the potentially homosexual one. In the chapters I read it did not say that Joe was homosexual but it might be inferred from the way he talks and activities he does like getting his nails painted. Of course these assumptions are based off of stereotypes people have about homosexual men but parents might be uncomfortable with their children reading about these characters. I would say to this concern that these are only characters in a book and there are many different people in the world that their children will be exposed to at one time or another so why not expose them to the different characters in this book? Besides its potentially controversial characters I thought that this text was really slow and it was hard to get into. Hopefully the pace of the text will pick up as the book continues.