Product Description

"America's Report Card offers a brilliant vision of contemporary American life that is frightening, darkly hilarious, and tinged with satire. John McNally tells the story of two unlucky people who forge an improbable yet possibly life-saving connection in a world overshadowed by the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind -- a world in which hulking government bureaucracies and vast corporations join forces to numb the populace into apathy with various standardization and surveillance programs. But McNally sees hope in the daily experiences of his characters: sometimes, haphazardly, by going about their own very particular lives, people circumvent the official program and begin to actively claim lives of freedom and dignity. America's Report Card is an arresting and humane portrait of life taking place in the margins, outside the stunted imagination of government and media. As in his critically acclaimed novel The Book of Ralph, McNally dazzles with characters like Jainey O'Sullivan -- a lonely, confused, purple-and-green-haired sometime truant, Jainey cares so little about high school that on her final standardized test, she writes an essay heaping scorn on the test administrators even as she asks her faceless reader for help. Charlie Wolf leads a fairy-tale graduate student life, with just enough money and clout to keep him in books, vodka, a threadbare apartment, and a beautiful, intellectual girlfriend. But the bohemian dream starts to crumble when Charlie takes a job scoring standardized tests and finds himself surrounded by people who are either plodding blindly along or caught up in wild conspiracy theories. When Charlie and Jainey stumble upon one another, they also stumble upon their own bravery and compassion. They try to protect each other from their habitual bad luck and the shadowy threats lurking at the edges of their lives, and what ensues doesn't follow any prescribed course. The official version of American life today may get the broad strokes and primary colors right, but America's Report Card reveals how the government and the media overlook the corners and shadows where our individual realities unfold all too often in chaotic, precarious, and bewildering ways. This wholly original, wildly entertaining novel mirrors our part in the dark but frequently redemptive comedy that is life. "

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63205 in eBooks
• Published on: 2006-08-08
• Released on: 2006-08-08
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

From Publishers Weekly
McNally (The Book of Ralph) takes a satiric, paranoid look at the dastardly machinations behind standardized testing. Charlie Wolf, 23, opts to stay in Iowa City after finishing graduate film school and secures for himself and his girlfriend, Petra Petrovich, what he presumes will be a cake job for the summer before the 2004 election: scoring standardized tests. While grading, he comes across an essay written by Jainey O'Sullivan, a 17-year-old suburban Chicago girl whose alarming assertions about the death of her art teacher—the Feds took her out for her anti-Bush rhetoric—touch him. (That Petra leaves him for a man living in Chicago also compels him to act.) It soon occurs to Charlie that the tests are designed to analyze the person taking the test, and when Charlie is transferred to the testing company's Chicago office, he discovers his suspicions are correct. Jainey, meanwhile, is obsessed with conspiracy theories and has a father in jail and a sociopath older brother (who is prone to hallucinations) living in the attic of the family house. The bizarre plot and colorful characters make for an engrossing read, though some readers may find the politicking too heavy-handed. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
McNally parlays the humorous, off-kilter vision in The Book of Ralph (2004), a coming-of-age tale set in a seedy Chicago suburb, into an even more high-voltage, culturally discerning, agilely comedic novel of Midwest angst and national paranoia. Jainey O'Sullivan, 17, finds refuge in creating a comic strip about Lloyd the Freakazoid while her father serves time in prison, her very scary brother sequesters himself in the attic, and her mother smokes. Weary of school, unnerved by her art teacher's death, and traumatized by what she is discovering about the world, Jainey pens an alarming personal essay for the last of the wretched national standardized tests she'll ever have to take. Her worrisome revelations catch the attention of a depressed employee of the National Testing Center in Iowa City. Charlie Wolf, just out of graduate school, has had his heart broken and is terrified of getting stuck in his lousy job. He decides to go to Burbank, Illinois, to rescue Jainey. These two compelling misfits form an unlikely alliance and confront a society gone mad. McNally's flair for the absurd, poker-faced humor, and dead-on critique of post-9/11 fearmongering are matched by crisp dialogue, superb pacing, and compassionate regard for humankind. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"At last -- a post-9/11 novel with imagination, guts, and integrity, and one that actually shows real people being sucked into the American nightmare. John McNally is a marvelous writer and should be applauded for producing this timely, stylish, and often hilarious book. This is Don DeLillo's White Noise for the overeducated, underemployed generation of Americans who, for the first time ever, will be poorer than their parents."-- Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting

"It has been a long time since I've been so excited, provoked, and haunted by a novel as I have been by America's Report Card. I want to run out and buy multiple copies -- for my kids' teachers, my co-workers . . . even my stupid senator. I flat-out can't wait to talk about this book, which is a brilliant, laugh-out-loud satire of contemporary American life with a tender, angry heart and enormous compassion for the little guy. You've got to read it. John McNally is emerging as one of the best American writers of the new century."-- Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing

"In America's Report Card, John McNally takes on domestic espionage, the American school system, and the mutative nature of love. Brilliantly written, McNally's unblinking novel is an earnest and hilarious portrayal of the American psyche at its worst and its best."-- Erika Krouse, author of Come Up and See Me Sometime

"John McNally's new novel is keenly biting social satire -- but with a living human heart inside its armor of wit. America's Report Card will leave you both laughing and wondering."-- Madison Smartt Bell, author of The Stone That the Builder Refused

"This is a great book. In America's Report Card, John McNally manages to be fierce and funny, darkly strange and completely relevant. For all the bottled rage in this book, it is ultimately a story about human connection, and an enduring one at that."-- Tom Barbash, author of The Last Good Chance and On Top of the World

Customer Reviews

Grade this one B+
Once again, McNally comes out with a nice book which doesn't seem to be getting the attention from the public that it deserves. I first came across his work in his solid debut short story collection "Troublemakers"; and his subsequent novel, "The Book of Ralph", was one of my favorite reads of 2004. I suspect that this latest book is perhaps suffering from an altogether bland cover, one that gives no indication as to the story inside nor any clue as to the tone. Hopefully the publisher will commission a full redesign for the paperback so that McNally's entertaining writing gets the packaging it deserves.

In any event, set in the summer before the 2004 presidential election, the story follows two separate protagonists. Charlie Wolf has just completed a useless Masters in Film Studies at the University of Iowa and is settling into a leisurely summer with his sexy Russian girlfriend. The couple take hourly wage jobs as test scorers with the massive corporation who runs the titular high school standardized exam. McNally once worked as a tester for such a company, and thus has plenty of ammo for a fairly wicked satire of the Dilbert/Office Space sweatshop inanities of such a workplace. Meanwhile, outside of Chicago, 17-year-old Jainey struggles to cope with her family life (father in jail, mother in a nicotine-fueled fugue, paranoid brother barricaded in the attic). The only adult she can even partially relate to is her art teacher, a woman who is sure the government is out to kill her. When Jainey discovers the art teacher dead, she pours her fears into the essay she writes for the standardized test which is eventually read by Charlie.

For reasons I don't wish to spoil, Charlie and Jainey meet and become allies of sorts. Without giving anything away, the story takes them deep into X-Files turf as they contemplate the notion that the bland standardized tests have a nefarious purpose. This plot element meshes somewhat with a somewhat awkward satire of the post 9-11 Bush administration. While it's refreshing to see such an unabashedly political stance (cf. the dedication to Ann Coulter, "America's Iago), this aspect would have benefited from a somewhat lighter touch. For example, Jainey discovers her art teacher's final project, a life-sized Osama Bin Laden dummy whose face peels off to reveal that of George Bush -- not exactly subtle. However, to be fair to McNally, satire is probably the hardest thing for a writer to pull off without it seeming forced, and at least he's stabbing his pen in the right direction. As usual, his characters are flawed and sympathetic souls you can completely root for, and there's a great sense of humor behind it all. Good stuff which hopefully more people will start to check out.

Blown Away
"Paranoia strikes deep ... into your life it will creep"
- Buffalo Springfield

Enough other reviewers have summarized the plot of this novel that for me to do the same would be akin to writing cliff notes to cliff notes. (It would bore both of us and won't tell you anything about the book that you probably don't already know by now.)

I will say, however, that I found this book extremely compelling, and I was hooked into it from the first few pages. It's a dark and wonderful paranoid fantasy filled with enough social satire and black humor to make it simultaneously hilarious and deeply poignant.

Normally, I am not one to engage in or encourage conspiracy theories, but the unprecedented amount of secrecy that our current administration insists on is enough to encourage some paranoid thoughts even in the most well-adjusted of citizens. John McNally does a masterful job of pulling those disquieting thoughts out into the open and shoving them in your face in a manner that makes you laugh, applaud, and shake your head in disbelief all at the same time.

It is no small feat to have conspiracy theories (some plausible, some wildly implausible) drive so many characters in one book. It is even more difficult to do this while preserving reader sympathy for the essential humanity of the characters in question.

I positively adored this book from start to finish and can honestly say that it's one of the best books that I've read in the last five years.

On a small side note, I must take exception to the review that stated "McNally ... fails when it comes to writing female characters" and that the "conversations between his main male and female characters are so clearly male written". On the contrary, I found myself frequently surprised that he succeeded in nailing the female perspective so well.

Clearly, that review was written by a man. (*wink*)

John Mcnally: America's Grader
McNally is to literature what Michael Moore is to documentaries: both have a keen sense of our nation's zeitgeist, and neither is afraid to probe beneath and search for truths most of us gloss over or ignore. While you may think that you have not taken a test in years, McNally's great book-with biting humor and acumen-delivers the trenchant realization that, perhaps, each of us is being tested without informed or conscious consent. Some readers may consider America's Report Card satire; others may call it allegorcal political fiction. Read it, and decide for youself. But whatever you call it, you have to call it a great book!