Joe Speedboat Review

Festival Author Tommy Wieringa's 'Joe Speedboat' tells the story of Frankie, who emerges crippled from a 200-day coma to find his small town, Lomark, is being turned on its head by a new arrival with the unlikely name of Joe Speedboat. Frankie proves an intriguing narrator; despite his immobility (or perhaps because of it) he is by far the most insightful character and often manages to unravel the motivations of the other characters. Frankie has one good arm, which he uses for writing and working his briquette presser. Until, that is, Joe sees something that only Joe would see: Frankie’s potential to become an arm-wrestling champion. Wieringa manages to fuse more fantastic story elements such as this with more commonplace events, chronicling ordinary life in a very ordinary town and the interactions between a group of adolescents moving into adulthood. At times comic, tragic and thrilling, 'Joe Speedboat' is, in a word, brilliant.