A character with a strong voice goes a long way, but mix in a shot of humor and a few dashes of the issues teens deal with, and you've got a winner. M.T. Anderson's Burger Wuss has so many right ingredients that's it's tough for me to tell just what I didn't like about it.

Anthony is so likeably helpless, the loser we all want to win. He's the guy who thinks that "There is a certain ferocity you need, to be a teenager in America," and is cleverly näive enough to mean it when he says it, even if he doesn't understand what he's saying.

And Turner's the opposite. From the moment I met him, I didn't trust him. I wanted him to drop his cell phone in the fry grease, walk into the cross hairs of a bird turd, put on magic shop deodorant that smells like onions, rip the back of his pants open on a bull's horn, gouge his knee on a VW bug bumper. You get the picture. None of those happened to Turner in the book, in case you had a visceral reaction to what I just said and made up new four letter swear words, scratching a thick "X" across your computer screen with your locker key. I made all those up.

But they could have been real, and I could have wanted Anthony to do them to Turner. That's how I felt, for a while. Then things switched on me. Someone changed my mind about him, and I started to see him as pathetic. Maybe that's what I didn't like about him. I wanted him to win so badly (Isn't that what we want for our heroes?) that I was disappointed when he turned out a sort of anti-hero, the kind that we're supposed to learn from in all the wrong ways and that leave a sour wrinkle in our brain because things aren't entirely right. Which isn't always bad, is it? Love, friends, jobs, family - they don't always work out. Life doesn't end up all whipped cream and strawberries all the time. Neither should books. Or so they say.

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