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    Uses for Boys: A Novel
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    Uses for Boys: A Novel
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    Uses for Boys: A Novel
    Ebook192 pages2 hours

    Uses for Boys: A Novel

    By Erica Lorraine Scheidt

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Anna remembers a time before boys, when she was little and everything made sense. When she and her mom were a family, just the two of them against the world. But now her mom is gone most of the time, chasing the next marriage, brining home the next stepfather. Anna is left on her own—until she discovers that she can make boys her family. From Desmond to Joey, Todd to Sam, Anna learns that if you give boys what they want, you can get what you need. But the price is high—the other kids make fun of her; the girls call her a slut. Anna's new friend, Toy, seems to have found a way around the loneliness, but Toy has her own secrets that even Anna can't know.
    Then comes Sam. When Anna actually meets a boy who is more than just useful, whose family eats dinner together, laughs, and tells stories, the truth about love becomes clear. And she finally learns how it feels to have something to lose—and something to offer. Real, shocking, uplifting, and stunningly lyrical, Uses for Boys by Erica Lorraine Scheidt is a story of breaking down and growing up.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 15, 2013
    ISBN9781250013811
    Unavailable
    Uses for Boys: A Novel
    Author

    Erica Lorraine Scheidt

    Erica Lorraine Scheidt studied writing at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and later received an MA in creative writing from the University of California, Davis. Now a teaching artist and longtime volunteer at 826 Valencia, she lives in Berkeley, California, and is at work on a second novel.

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    Reviews for Uses for Boys

    3/5

    37 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 2/5
      Cross posted from rabidgummibear.wordpress.com
      At first glance Uses For Boys appears to be a young adult novel not one for a mature audience. The book is written from Anna's point of view in a format reminiscent of a diary. More or less a coming of age tale for a girl who has spent most her life on the back burner to her mom's whims.

      We start with the "tell me again times" when Anna is a little kid living with her mom before the train of step-dads enter her life. Anna learns that boys will make you feel and give you what you want, but the costs of these 'fixes' for her become too much.

      I'll start with what I liked about this book, which wasn't a lot. It felt real and just like something that a friend you know may tell you about. I enjoyed seeing the growth in the character. I loved how it was written and that is what kept me reading the book. The uniqueness to the writing style is great and refreshing.

      The things I didn't like. This book appears to be a young adult novel from the outside and I worry someone picking it up thinking that and just being shocked. I was shocked by some of the things in this book. Left wondering a lot where the adults where in this story. Finally my last complaint is the end. I was left feeling like we got no resolution to Anna's story.

      Overall I can't really rate this book that high for me as a person to reads to escape and go to new places this book is trash. It left me feeling sad. I give it 2/5 stars.

    • 3/5
      A dark and gritty story, this book was unusually hard to read. To see a character struggle soo much....not to mention the amount of lack of support and a mess up mind set, you can't help but feel so many emotions.Anger. That is the first thing I felt while reading this story. Then shock. How can parent be so nonexistent in their child's life? How can a parent just sit back and watch a child struggle and not care? I found myself asking these questions and more throughout the plot. Anna basically grows up on her own with no family, no mentor, nobody. She has to learn such harsh lessons on her own with nobody to guide her. And I'm not talking about lessons about cooking. Boys. Lots of boys. Boys taking advantage of Anna. Anna being pressured. I shook my head so many times reading this story. I wanted to step in, guide her, give her love, and a peace of mind.There are so many love interests cause Anna jumps from one extreme to another. Anna grows up quickly at such a young age, stepping into adult relationships that I could care less for. It hurt watching Anna trying to figure out love and family. She did everything but fall into what a love and family really is. *Caution* I recommend this book to anyone over 18+. Anna may be just a teen, but she does some dark, crazy, dangerous things at such a young age. There is lots of sexual activity (vivid), drinking, drugs, rape, and abortion, just to name a few.Uses For Boys is a bleak, crazy pursuit of a dangerous road. It disturbs the reader with the amount of promiscuity and the search for love that they yearn for. Uses For Boys has great depth to the core of the story, a family. A real uncomfortable view of what some teens do go through, Uses For Boys is surreal.
    • 4/5
      Mature content. Anna's mother used to tell her the story of how she was all alone and wanted a girl, and then she had Anna. It was a story that Anna loved, but then Anna's Mom wanted something else -- a husband and a house and she didn't have any more time for Anna, even after the divorces. So Anna fills the void with boys. It's heartbreaking to think that some children grow up with so little parental involvement, and a good reminder to readers to be generous to people in need.
    • 4/5
      Told in lyrical prose, USES FOR BOYS is the story of a lost girl. A girl whose mother is constantly looking for a man to complete her, who has learned to live with the very little she has, and who has met all the wrong boys her whole life. From the one who touched her on the bus, to the others who take advantage of her, Anna can't seem to catch a break. Her best friend Toy -- whom she met shopping at a thrift store -- is her only rock. But even this relationship is toxic, as Toy goes on and on about her perfect boyfriends and her amazing life, while Anna fantasizes about the lives of the girls on her walls -- pages torn from magazines.USES FOR BOYS by Erica Lorraine Scheidt is the sort of book that is best taken in sips, rather than gulps. It is as jarring as it is beautifully written. It's the sort of book that leaves you with just the right questions, and is certainly going to attract fans of Francesca Lia Block and Laurie Halse Anderson.
    • 3/5
      **Warning - This review will contain spoilers**I really wanted to love this book. The cover and the blurb appealed to the romantic in me. Even after I started reading, I thought there was such an opportunity to develop a story of personal redemption, to show how a girl can make the choices that Anna does earlier in the story and still learn to value herself.The first few chapters do an amazing job of setting up how the abandonment by her father and the emotional distance from her mother has effected her. She watches her mother go from man to man, constantly in search for someone who will 'love' her. It's an example Anna begins to follow. It's sad at first and while I didn't really like Anna, I could pity her. Then she's raped and I think okay, here's a turning point. Instead, she mopes around wondering why her rapist didn't kiss her?!?! Uh, what? I could have understood her feeling anger, hurt, fear, even misplaced guilt, but curiosity about why he didn't kiss her?? This is when I realized that Anna didn't mind having sex with different guys. She didn't mind being used by the guys. She was using them as much as they were using her. And that is where my sympathy for her ended. There's a lot of narrative about her being alone, and how her mom just doesn't care, but ultimately she makes the same choices as her mom, and then still whines about her. The boys in the book are set up to be villains, but honestly, apart from the one who rapes her (although her thought process doesn't even suggest that she would have said no) they are simply doing what typical teenage boys do. If a girl has no respect for herself, then they're not going to respect her. Should they? Yes, but if you're willing to sit on school bus and jerk one of them off while his buddies and everyone else on the bus watches then that's on you. Especially when you keep doing it. I thought this would be the lesson Anna learns. That she has value and should expect to be valued by boys. But even at the end she is driven by the physical side.Sam is set up as her savior, but he's not. He is simply a boy whose parents taught him to be respectful of everyone regardless of their actions. The blurb on the book suggests that he teaches Anna that she has a value beyond sex, but he doesn't (consider the fact that she cheats on him twice with a one night stand). Sam's a virgin, all the way up until Anna manages to pressure him into having sex. Then she gets him to lie to his parents about it. When they get caught by his mom, Anna suddenly feels embarrassed. Then book is pretty much over. She never changes her actions. She never stops complaining about the way her mom is always on the hunt for a new man. She never tries to help her friend Toy deal with the problems she obviously has. She simply keeps going.I've read a few reviews and many say there was no point to this book. That it ends before we see Anna come to any realizations. And while I agree that we don't see that, I wonder if that isn't the point. Could it be that the blurb is misleading? Maybe this is really a story about a girl who never has and never will place any value on herself beyond what she can give to boys. Maybe it is a hard look at how some people never change, no matter how many times they get hurt.This is not a book for everyone and my recommendations would be limited to much older teens. The sex is graphic for YA and there is no lesson to learn from the mistakes she makes.In the end I just liked it and blame myself for judging a book by its cover.
    • 4/5
      Pros:
      * Stark, bare, raw writing
      * Unreliable (lost) narrator
      * Captures something haunting
      * Entire actions and scenes are captures in a sentence or two

      Cons:
      * Bare bones narration combined with shakiness of the narrator makes you wonder how much is true or is really happening.
      * Entire actions and scenes are captures in a sentence or two, which can lead to some backtracking when a scene doesn't make sense
      * Depressing as hell

      The headline on the back of this book is, "If you give boys what they want, they give you what you need. Right?" And it sums up the novel perfectly.

      From her missing father, to her mother who is always looking for someone to stave off the loneliness Anna never had a chance. And when she mistakes sex for love to replace this emptiness, all she does is make the same mistakes her mother did.
    • 4/5
      You get a good sense of what goes through a young girl's head when she allows herself to be a target for boys - starting from an inability to react, to a way to get affection, so she believes, to an acceptance of what's expected of her, all stemming from the lack of love meant to be had from her parents. The book seems to be for teens, but the explicit sexual references makes me wish no minors would read it. I wish the author would have considered that the book would help so many more teens without such explicitness. As it is, I think it works better as a reference for parents and other caregivers of teens.I do appreciate the many subjects brought up in the book, the main character's growth, and final acceptance of her worth.
    • 3/5
      Uses for Boys is a very different sort of novel. It is sad and slightly disturbing. Anna uses sex as a way to fill the holes in her life, which is slightly tragic in it’s own way. Unlike other novels I’ve read with difficult sexual content, Anna didn’t feel like a particularly strong character to me. The story overall was short and fast paced. I liked the way it was written, but the story overall ended up being in the middle for me (not good, not bad—just slightly disturbing).Anna is a very shy and awkward girl. She has no idea how to interact with people, and I think this is because for most of her life, she was pretty much alone. She essentially had an absentee parent, who just threw money at her. She didn’t have many friends growing up and was socially awkward. So when she has a sexual encounter at a very young age, that I would classify as sexual harassment, she just kind of freezes and just doesn’t know what to do. Unfortunately for her, the school treats her like a social pariah because of the incident and so she turns to boys to fill the hole in her life with sex—confusing it with love.The story that follows is filled with sexual encounters—not steamy ones, but awkward ones. Rape, harassment, sexual pressure, and this poor lonely girl just takes it all like it’s normal—like these are the kinds of things that are supposed to happen to her. We do see Anna grow throughout the story, though. She starts to learn that sex is not a replacement for love. She learns what family is and that there is a way to be treated that transcends being used.
Uses for Boys is a short quick read about growing up. Faced with a very lonely upbringing, Anna must learn the meaning of love and family. Along the way, she is mistreated and even abused, and while her story is on the disturbing side, it does have a glimmer of hope in it.
    • 4/5
      Actual rating: 3.5(This book review was originally posted at My Library in the Making.)It has been almost an hour since I finished reading Uses for Boys but I still have mixed feelings about it, and you might be thinking that's not a good sign at all—let me tell you: it's good and bad.At first, I thought Anna was strong, being able to cope with an absentee mother and one stepfather after another with just the memory of what she called the "tell-me-again times" with her mom. Well, that was until she discovered that if she let boys use her for their satisfaction, she can use them to forget about everything that she didn't have, too. Her personality and decision-making just went downhill from there.I'm sure I'm not alone in hating whiners, and that's what, I think, will break this book for most people. Thank heavens Anna's complaining wasn't make-a-scene "I hate my life!" but more like whisper-in-a-corner "I want someone else's life". Even then, I believe she could've not let her need for love ruin her future; she disappointed me greatly while making me pity her, as well.With boys who didn't really care about her and a questionable friendship with Toy, a girl she met while shopping, she knew well enough not to expect anything when she met Sam, but he soon proved her wrong because he does care. He teaches her what it's like to love and be loved, and even introduces her to the thing she knows least of: family. Their romance, although presented pretty late into the story, was as real as it could get with Anna's situation, and I really liked them together.With a gratifying ending added to the sometimes confusing but constantly lyrical writing, Uses for Boys turned out to be very different from what I thought it would be. It may not be for everyone, but I can assure you that it's worth the try.MY FAVORITE PART was when Sam introduced Anna to his family on their first date.