Pipeliner

Hello everyone! It's Shani and today I'm going to be reviewing Pipeliner by Shawn Hartje.

Published: November 30th 2016
Publisher: Self-published
Author: Shawn Hartje
Length: 249 pages
My rating: 3.5/5

Hartje's novel Pipeliner follows the narrative of a teenage boy called Jason Krabb, a high school student and aspiring guitarist. The novel follows Jason through his 'coming of age' period where he inevitably matures a great deal. The novel is set in the 1990's and has a range of references through out the course of the novel which make the novel really feel within the time frame that Hartje has set it in.

One of the key things which I enjoyed about Hartje's novel was the characterisation of Jason. It was interesting to read the novel from a male's perspective, as a majority of the novels I read are either written in a third person narrative or a first person female narrative. Male perspectives are sparse in the genre of YA literature and even in some of the adult genres which I have read. So, delving into Hartje's seventeen-year-old character of Jason was intriguing. Jason has a great ambitious, as many teenagers do, to become a guitarist. However, Jason doesn't quite realise the amount of effort it will take him to achieve this goal and seems to overestimate his ability to become a popular guitarist. I loved the fact that Jason's older brother attended Princeton it showed a great contrast between the two characters, and also implied that perhaps Jason felt overshadowed by his elder sibling - a trait which many readers can relate to if they have any older siblings. It was fun reading about Jason's journey but at times I felt that Jason's aspirations were somewhat dull and cliche.

One of Jason's main ambitions throughout the novel is to find himself a girlfriend and to party as much as he can. This concept that Jason 'needed' to find a girlfriend irked me slightly as it seemed to be one of the biggest things on his mind throughout the novel. I just wished he had slightly more ambition than to simply get a girlfriend and party as much as he liked, but then this was also interesting because Hartje was presenting me with a perspective which I hadn't considered before.

Hartje's pacing of the novel was at times a little slow but his language in the novel was refreshing and kept me reading despite some of my reservations about his themes. I felt that the sexual scenes in the novel were perhaps unnecessary. Whilst I understand that the novel is a 'coming of age' I felt that the sexual scenes didn't need to be in the novel and could have been implied, rather than explicitly described. The substance abuse as well - drugs are mentioned quite a lot in the novel - I think this is perhaps why I couldn't find myself being able to relate to the story because whilst it did in some ways describe the typical life of a teenager coming of age, I felt that it was at times stereotypical though this may have been the writer's aims to create a slightly cliched perspective on teenagers for humour.

Overall, I did enjoy aspects of Pipeliner and I believe that it would be an enjoyable read for those who are able to relate to the story more. Perhaps because I was born towards the end of the 1990's and therefore have no recollection of the era that I didn't enjoy it as much as other readers may!

If you are interested in reading Pipeliner than here is the link for the Kindle Edition: https://www.amazon.com/Pipeliner-Shawn-Hartje-ebook/dp/B01NBFHDTX