THE
IMPROBABLE THEORY OF ANA & ZAK
Brian
Katcher
Katherine
Tegen Books 2015 328 Pages
There’s a
gap wider than the entire breadth of the alphabet between A (Ana) and Z (Zak), the high school protagonists
of this Young Adult comedy of escalating errors.
A type A
personality, driven overachiever and straight-A student Ana Watson resembles a
proto-Margaret Thatcher. The product of
a strict upbringing, repressed Ana is meekly subservient to parental
diktats while coming across as arrogant and aloof to everyone else.
Happy-go-lucky
slacker Zakory “Duke” Duquette, on the other hand, has no clear goals in life
and is happy to drift along; indulging his fondness for such geeky pastimes as
role-playing games, comic books, science fiction movies and other such manifestations
of American pop culture.
Both characters are
humanly flawed, somewhat irritating and fairly well-rounded. Not very likable
initially, A and Z are reluctantly thrown together for purposes of an
inter-school quiz contest. But Ana is not the only one chafing under her
parent’s strict regime. Younger brother Clayton, fired by Zak’s accounts of
attending past Sci-Fi conventions, goes AWOL from the quiz team’s hotel to
visit the “WashingCon".
What follows
is a desperate teaming of two very disparate characters to retrieve the errant
prodigal with no one in authority the wiser– and so avert feared parental
retribution. Naturally, Murphy’s Law reigns and everything that can go wrong
does.
Even if the
many comic disasters the duo encounter in the course of their quest over a
frenetic 24 hours appear to be occasionally unbelievable in their intensity and
frequency, the action zips along quite nicely. The author’s amused affection
for the tropes of typical science fiction and fantasy conventions comes across
and geek sub-culture is nicely portrayed.
There’s a lot of deft situational comedy in this page-turner,
but Zak and Ana’s growing attraction feels more like an immature, misplaced
crush than a legitimate romance between two almost-adults. Instead of dating happily ever after by the
close, they seem more likely to drive each other around the bend.
“Improbable” is a good word to describe their pairing, and this
YA romp doesn’t really prove the improbable theory of its central romance.
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