The Miseducation Years

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View books by Paul Howard.

Disapointed!! - Rated
My younger sister raved about these books she said they were the best ever and thought they really were the focking bees knees! I on the other hand was only mildly amused by it. Yes it is funny and a couple of times I did laugh out loud but definitely not the side clutching book I was expecting. Maybe its an age thing I'm 27 my sis is 21 but then again not sure. I found it very very repetitive, I found it very very repetitive and in between the odd laugh i was a bit bored with the antics of Ross. Not sure i'll read any more of them maybe if my sis can convince me they get better and if I had nothing else to do then yeah give it a bash. All in all considering my sis hyped it up so much I was disapointed.

Only good if you're from Dublin my orse!! - Rated
I felt it was my personal duty to defend this book when reading one of the other reviews. Everyone has met a "Ross" somewhere in their lives and I believe anyone in Ireland would be able to identify with this book not just those from Dublin. A really wonderful book and series and if I had any complaint at all it would probably be the inconvienience of not being able to put it down and perhaps the looks I attract when I'm unable to prevent myself from saying things like "hit and miss", "giving me total filthies" and my personal favourite "Allied Irish".

Not the original book, but still worthy of five stars - Rated
This is not the original edition of this book. It was originally released under the title "The Miseducation of Ross O'Carroll Kelly" in 2000. I have read both versions of the story, and while the orignal is vastly superior, this is still a book very worthy of your time.

The book basically centres around a typical Dublin 4 rugby player called Ross O'Carroll Kelly. He loves himself, and believes that everyone else does as well, although he is usually wrong. It's a hilarious diary style account of his life as a member of the Castlerock College senior cup team (both times he was in sixth year). He goes into detail about the "birds" he's "worn the face off" and those he wants to get "conkers deep in". He talks about his "orsehole dickhead" of a father and his "focking embarrassing" mother and all the stuff he has to put up with from them. He's in short the most immature person you can ever imagine, but this is what makes the book so much fun to read!

As I am from Dublin myself, I understand the type of person this book is based on, but I'm not sure somebody that has never spent any length of time living here would understand it. We've all met people like Ross, and we know people that act like hime, but the accent is written phonetically. This is good when you can hear the voice, and it makes it even funnier, but for someone from outside Dublin it would be irritating. There's also a lot of references to places and schools in Dublin that wouldn't be understood by people who didn't know the area.

As for the rewrite of the book, the original story is almost the same. It follows the same timeline, but bits have been put in, other bits have been left out, and characters have been changed (notably Sorcha, who is made into a nicer person in this edition). There's no rugby team day out to climb Carantoohill on the worst day of the year and getting airlifted out. Ross doesn't have an epiphany at the end of the book due to an overdose of Creatine (they don't even take creatine in this edition, they take testosterone). The structure of the book is no longer based around American Psycho as the original was. And real school names are now included in the text rather than their nicknames only, making it less funny.

Why???

Still, you can't get the original anymore, so this one will have to do for those of you that don't own it. If you've never heard of Ross O'Carroll Kelly, read this ASAP (even if you're not from Dublin, give it a go). You wont be disappointed.