I read this because I bought Getting the Girl, and then it turned out that Getting the Girl was a sequel to Fighting Ruben Wolfe. I haven’t liked reading things out of order since I was a young lass reading Patricia C. Wrede’s Dragons books. I read Talking to Dragons first and found it totally confusing, and after that I resolved to read things properly and in order thereafter. (The one exception being the Chronicles of Narnia. I can see a person being just as happy reading those books in the order they were written, which would give them the joyous good fortune of reading The Horse and His Boy rather late in the game. Also The Magician’s Nephew – it is my fourth favorite, but it clusters high up with the four best ones, rather than down a bit lower with Prince Caspian, The Terrifying Silver Chair, and The Last Battle. I like Uncle Andrew.
Er, anyway. Fighting Ruben Wolfe is all about two brothers, Ruben and Cameron, whose father has lost his job, and their whole family is trying really hard to keep its head above water. And Ruben and Cameron – ostensibly to get some extra money for themselves – get involved doing fights for money. Ruben always wins, and Cameron often loses.
In fact I wasn’t expecting to like this book much. People’s first novels are sometimes not very good, and this was Markus Zusak’s first novel. Furthermore I have only sisters and am greatly averse to pain, so I was thinking that I would be unable to identify with anything here. But actually it was quite moving. I didn’t cry at the end – not like when I read The Book Thief and weep helplessly every time – but I got pretty teary-eyed and sniffly. They fight their circumstances! They stick together and are brothers! It’s very uplifting.