The Fracking King: A Novel by James Browning
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I really don’t know what to make of The Fracking King. It is obviously penned by a talented author. I found it fascinating and wanted to keep reading. It was very engaging. It just was kind of a hot mess.
The protagonist, Winston Crwth is a teen Scrabble prodigy. I was completely unaware such things existed. The entire book is very focused on Scrabble – obsessively so. While I can’t claim to have been misled – the synopsis clearly talks about “hardcore Scrabble” – I never expected that something so seemingly meaningless to me could be so massively important to a story.
Winston is an awkward student entering his third high school, this one a bizarre and isolated boarding school filled with half-developed characters. The school is so backwards and weird that it can only be based on personal experience.
The other main theme of the novel is about the controversial practice of fracking, where pressurized liquids of questionable content are injected into wellbores to break up rock formations and stimulate mining of gas. The author seems to be extremely knowledgeable on the subject and calling attention to the environmental issues is undoubtedly the main purpose of the novel. But it’s simply not digestible. For something that is talked about so much it is explained so little. The book assumes a similar amount of expertise on the part of the reader and speaks in shorthand; it’s an ill-advised presumption.
Mainly, it’s a frustrating novel. There’s a great story in here, but the hyper-focus on the specifics of Scrabble and fracking don’t leave much room for development of the characters and the story is very disjointed. But it’s really interesting at the same time. I really have very mixed feelings about it. While I start to conclude that it was poorly written, I realize that I couldn’t put it down, so it certainly possessed some great qualities. I suppose I’d say that it wasn’t enjoyable but was engaging.
[schema type=”book” name=”The Fracking King” description=”A striking debut novel about boarding school, hardcore Scrabble, and fracking—a new kind of environmental novel by an important voice in the debate about fracking in America. When the tap water at the Hale Boarding School for Boys bursts into flames, people blame fracking. Life at Hale has always been fraught—the swim test consists of being thrown into the pool with wrists and ankles tied, and a boy can be expelled if he and a girl keep fewer than “three feet on the floor.” But the sight of combustible drinking water and the possibility that fracking is making Hale kids sick turn one student into an unlikely hero in the fight to stop the controversial drilling practice. Winston Crwth, a Scrabble prodigy whose baffling last name rhymes with “truth,” knows what it’s like to be “fractured,” having grown up with his father in Philadelphia and his mother in California. On Winston’s comic journey to the Pennsylvania State Scrabble Championship, where he hopes to win an audience with beauty-queen-turned-governor Linda King LaRue, he matches wits with Thomasina Wodtke-Weir, the headmaster’s prematurely gray daughter and the most popular (read: only) girl at school; the state poet laureate, whose verse consists of copying out dictionary entries and restroom graffiti; and David Dark, son of the CEO of Dark Oil & Gas, the source of Winston’s scholarship money. The Fracking King is a fantastically inventive debut about rowing crew, using all your tiles, and trying to save the world.” author=”James Browning” publisher=”New Harvest” pubdate=”2014-07-01″ isbn=”0544262999″ ebook=”yes” hardcover=”yes” ]