Playground

Playground
 

By: 50 Cent
Reviewer: Mr. Lamincent, 14
Rating: Really liked it


What first attracted me to this book was the fact it was written by 50 Cent. Aside from loving the hip hop industry as a whole, 50 Cent is also my big brother's favorite rap artist of all time, so of course I couldn't pass this up.

In 50's debut YA Novel, you follow Butterball, an overweight 8th grader who after a violent altercation with his friend, is viewed as a bully to the whole school. As a result of slinging his friend Maurice continuously in the face with a sock filled with D batteries, Butterball is assigned two therapist appointments a week.

It's safe to say that a good, probably, half of the book is spent in Liz's, Butterball's therapist's, office. As Butterball starts to shed more and more of his defensive uneasiness with Liz, as well as his own denial, he slowly starts to reveal his skeletons in the closet to the reader.

What's interesting about this book is that you get two sides to every story that Butterball tells, from Butterball himself. The first side is usually the surface of what happened, what everyone else thought and assumed. The second side is the dissected, "this is why that happened", side. Its the availability of both sides that really gets you to love Butterball in a weird, distant way.

As the book progresses, you follow Butterball's struggle to shake the label of "Bully" he accidentally (and unintentionally) provided himself with. And when it comes down to it, watching the struggle is truly breath-taking.

There are a couple few things about the book that took away from the gripping story, though. For instance, 50 Cent, being a rap star (among other things, but that primarily), really set himself up to sound very... well... informal, and that certainly shows in the dialogue - the "sh-" word is used more times in a chapter than probably a minute of one of his songs - but the prose itself is so traditionally written that you can't help but wonder, "Did 50 have a ghost writer?" Also, the chapters were very short and choppy. While this does aid the speed in which you read it (I read it in a day, no problem), its almost like 50 Cent was afraid to give Butterball too much substance, which was disappointing since it took a while to fully develop him as a character.

As a story, however, Playground is groundbreaking, showing the other side of the bullying epidemic. And 50 Cent showcases yet another one of his many talents.