Name: Skippy Dies
Rating: 3.696428571428572 (28 reviews)
ISBN: 9780241141823

Paul Murray

Skippy Dies

Why does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin's venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop? Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory? Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy's rival in love? Or could "the Automator"—the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school—have something to hide? Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined. With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin "MC Sexecutioner" Flynn to basketballplaying midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members. As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.

A Novel

Could have been 50-100 pages shorter, but another excellent Paul Murray book. 

Tom Koss

Hilarious and heart-wrenching. This book is a total blast and an absolute gem. 

Frederik De Bosschere

Tim Pennington-Russell

Turned out to be quite realistic and fairly pessimistic too. But a good read. I thought it would be lighter so the grittiness took me aback.

Robin M Cabana

This was a very twisty read - Irish school boys, mythology, physics, some very funny, but also dark stuff mixed in. It rambles and shifts from character to character, in sense proving the string theory of it all.

After 14-year-old Skippy ends up dead on the floor of a local donut shop, a number of suspects emerge at Skippy's school in Dublin, in a hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence.

Zoe Smolen

I'm not really sure how I felt about this book. Though it kept me reading, I felt as though many of the plots lines were unnecessary, and that I could have done without a lot of the subplots which were intertwined with the main story. However, Murray's writing style was highly fascinating to me, and I very much enjoyed the stylistic risks he took with the novel. 

Overall, I enjoyed the book, but would recommend it only to someone who is willing to put up with a kind of slow read.

Daryl Houston

This was a very easy and fun read, which is not to say that it's all fun and games. Although it is a vastly different book from Gaddis's JR, I couldn't help at times thinking of Gaddis's book, which also treats of a flailing teacher and a puckish kid (not that any one kid in Skippy Dies is a direct match for JR). Although it's not kid lit, it didn't strike me as an especially grown-up book either; that is, while it made me think back to being a teenager and confronting the attendant problems, the book's treatment of grown-up problems didn't resonate a great deal with my experience. Which is fine. I don't need it to have done so, necessarily, though perhaps a better book would have done so (or maybe the reader's at fault here). At any rate, I really enjoyed this one. I've heard that Murray's first novel wasn't nearly as good as this one, but I'll be eager to see what he comes up with next.

Phil James

I wish there were more stars I could give. It blew me away.

Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel ?Skippy? Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the Frisbee-playing Siren from the girls? school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest ? including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and official school psychopath. While his teachers battle over modernisation, and Ruprecht attempts to open a portal into a parallel universe, Skippy, in the name of love, is heading for a showdown ? in the form of a fatal doughnut-eating race that only one person will survive. This unlikely tragedy will explode Seabrook?s century-old complacency and bring all kinds of secrets into the light, until teachers and pupils alike discover that the fragile lines dividing past from present, love from betrayal ? and even life from death ? have become almost impossible to read . . .

Alyssia

Took a very long time to get started, and only the last 100 or so pages really get going. The story was well thought through, just could have been more developed.

Skippy Dies

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