The unnamed 13-year-old narrator of first-time author Maureen Fergus’s novel thinks he has it pretty rough. After he’s insulted one too many schoolteachers and other authority figures, his mother forces him to keep a tape-recorded diary as a way of expressing opinions that would be best kept to himself. Instead, he decides to turn his oral journal into a chronicle of “the sad life of a boy who should have grown up in luxury” but was failed by a mother who eloped with a “pointless nobody” who stacks fruit in the local FoodBarn.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, the narrator is forced to move to Winnipeg after his father (the pointless nobody) agrees to take over the flagship location of the hardware-store franchise that the narrator hopes to inherit one day. When the narrator gets into the same old troubles with his new teachers, his mother forces him to volunteer at a local soup kitchen run by a pathologically upbeat born-again Christian named Jerry.

This set-up provides plenty of opportunities to dramatize the narrator’s stunning insensitivity, which Fergus does to great effect without making him totally unlikable or reducing him to a faceless bundle of adolescent anxieties. There are many truly funny moments, especially in the scenes between the narrator and his sexy guidance counsellor. Fergus also anchors the corrosive narrative in a strong, believable family dynamic and plenty of heartbreaking school-is-hell moments.

However, the spoiled-adolescent genre demands a measure of emotional growth from its morally retarded protagonist, and here Fergus occasionally slips up. Comic scenes illustrating the narrator’s extreme self-absorption are piled on top of each other for about 150 pages before he’s finally moved to feel compassion for another human being. The reluctant moral transformation is handled well, but because it happens so suddenly and so late in the novel, the story feels pushed to a too-swift conclusion.

But there are more than enough laughs and cutting observations about the moral lapses of the adult world to keep target readers hooked. There are also enough strong secondary characters and potential subplots to coax a few more adventures from this narrator.