La 5ème : La (encore) pire année de ma vie !

As much as I hated the first book, I think this one was almost as bad.In this book, Rafe tries to do what's right. For about less than half the book. After that he pretty much throws it all out the window. The first "friend" he makes at his new school, Matty, is a troublemaker who helps him get back at some bullies. Why Rafe, didn't you get expelled from school last year for getting in trouble? Shouldn't you not keep breaking the rules, then? This is what was going through my mind, but apparently Rafe doesn't care if he gets kicked out of this art school that he so badly wanted to get in.And then there's the whole mess with his father. Why, oh why, did this happen? There was this whole storyline about his father being gone, but no one knows where he went. So throughout the book it's been kind of a side story to find his dad. After a humiliating situation at school, his mom finally tells him what really happened.And takes him to a cemetery.A cemetery!? At the end of the chapter where his mom takes him there's a part something along the lines of, "You already guessed it, probably. A cemetery." No, I didn't guess that. I didn't guess that your mother would be such a horrible woman that she would tell her son that his dad left them and making him seem like an awful person instead of telling him that he died saving his country. There's no point! Rafe even says himself that now he thinks better of his dad. That he's not just the guy who left, but the guy who was a hero. It was completely pointless and stupid.The ultimate ending was pretty much the same as the first - his mom has a job, they live in Hills Valley, Rafe has to go to Summer School, and he's going to be entering his precious art school that is for some reason so much better than the one he's at. So in ways this book was better than the first, but considering how nothing changed, it may have been worse.