All The Right Stuff - Walter Dean Meyers

All The Right Stuff

Walter Dean Meyers

2012

I really liked this book's cover. I downloaded it for my ereader from my library's website solely because I liked the orange and the blue in the cover. I should have probably read a little bit about it first, but I was just looking for some books to read on my vacation. I read this book in about two days, and it was an alright book, just not what I'm used to.

All The Right Stuff is about Paul DuPree who lives in Harlem and is working at a soup kitchen four days a week and tutoring a girl one day a week during the summer. Elijah, the old man who owns the soup kitchen, teaches Paul how to make soup, but more importantly, he won't shut up about something called the 'social contract'. That's the basis of this novel. A lot of other things happen (he befriends Keisha, the girl he is tutoring in basketball, he meets up with a very well known drug dealer/big shot named Sly, etc). 

The book is all about deep thinking and Elijah asks Paul a lot of questions about the social contract. If that was a concept I was interested in, I might have enjoyed the book more. Or maybe if I wasn't looking for something fun to read while I was on holidays.

The novel was well written, and you can see a change in the character of Paul from the beginning of the book to the end, especially in how he talks to people such as Keisha or Sly. There was very little plot though. The majority of the book was spent discussing the social contract and a lot of the book was  told in conversations between Elijah and Paul, or just Paul thinking. While some things did happen and I wanted to know how they were resolved, I didn't feel like there was a lot of action. 

I give this book 2.5 out of 5 stars. Had I been in the mood for a more philosophical novel I may have enjoyed this more. More plot would have been nice.

You can buy this book from Amazon here: All The Right Stuff

Have you read this book? Have you read anything else by Walter Dean Meyers? If you have, which book would you recommend?
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