Review of "Junky Font" by Riassat Karim

​Score: 88/100 (8.8 out of 10)

Junky Font is a coming-of-age romantic fantasy novel by Riassat Karim.

Junky, the titular protagonist, is a gifted but isolated thirteen-year-old beginning at Akitsalohks, an elite high school in Bongosland. He is bullied by Ludesar and Narmiz, struggling with abuse and rejection at home, and becomes intensely fixated on Hesuna, a girl who is already involved with the aggressive Bisah. Junky also believes he possesses clairvoyance, prophetic dreams, artistic genius, and a rare destiny.

At school, the year head, Mrs. Arivnat, takes a special interest in Junky. She recruits him to quietly investigate rival student groups, The Illegals and The Legals, whose leaders, Lasiaf and Rursam, are competing over Lily Rose. Meanwhile, Junky becomes a local celebrity by singing and playing guitar at school, receiving overwhelming support to perform at a major school concert.

Up to this point, the book is still mostly about Junky dealing with school, bullies, his crush, and his growing popularity as a musician. However, Karim is clearly building toward something bigger. The rival gangs, Mrs. Arivnat’s unusual interest in Junky, his visions, and the strange events around the school all suggest that this is not going to remain a simple school story for long.

And that's why stuff really hits the fan and this book starts to jump the shark.

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WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

The story shifts gears when Bisah kidnaps Utes, the girlfriend of Junky’s mentor-like friend Noppin. Junky leads Noppin and Nonirp into Bisah’s warehouse hideout, where the realistic school drama gives way to full supernatural action. Bisah has a magical chain capable of controlling people, and Junky learns that his friend Ivla has been manipulated while struggling with a werewolf curse.

The warehouse showdown becomes the book’s main emotional and supernatural turning point. Junky is forced to face accusations that he is talented but deeply self-absorbed, and that his obsession with his own destiny has harmed people close to him. Through Hesuna, Ivla, the spirit of Bisah’s ancestor Khabib, and eventually Junky’s own ancestor Zagrid Font, Junky realizes that his gifts cannot simply be used to make himself famous, admired, or fulfilled. He has to use them to serve others.

Junky helps expose Bisah’s mind control, rescues Utes, breaks the chain’s influence, and sees Bisah arrested. But the victory has consequences. Ivla, though manipulated, is arrested for the violent acts committed while transformed. Junky then wins the school music contest after performing “That Strange Boy,” although a corrupt or compromised judge tries to block his victory. The novel closes by setting up the next installment: Numan La B A may be connected to Bisah, civil unrest is coming to Bongosland, and Junky and his friends plan to free Ivla.


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MAJOR SPOILERS END

We're gonna be honest with you: this book lost us. Actually, we're not sure if it ever really had us to begin with. There's just something about it... something that seemed really off, but that we couldn't quite put a finger on. Something about it didn't quite click for us. It didn't quite grip us, even after numerous readings and rereadings.

We know you can't judge a book by its cover, or a book by the name of its main protagonist, but the name Junky Font is the furthest thing from enticing and appealing that we could imagine. You're saddled with a character constantly being referred to as "Junky." We kinda get it. Sometimes, it helps to give a surprise-badass character a humble-sounding name like Guy or Sam. We just read Muppet Boy by Michael J. Bowler in which Moe, the main character, is constantly called "Muppet Boy." Both examples suck a lot of the drama, suspense, and aura out of everything just by virtue of the goofiness of the names. It's hard to take a book seriously when you've got a guy named Junky Font and people who are referred to as Bongos from Bongosland (like the drums).

There are also some really strange things that do not quite compute or make sense to us. For example, the book treats Junky winning a local singing contest as a child as evidence that he is practically divinely gifted and destined for greatness. Later, he sings at school and quickly becomes such an overwhelming sensation that nearly everyone worships him while every other musician is framed as jealous of his talent. It is not that a thirteen-year-old cannot be gifted. It is that the book is constantly trying to convince us that Junky is the most talented, charismatic, attractive, intelligent, psychic, and special person in every room he enters. We're not sure if being a good singer or good at music indicates you're a psychic or a precog.

The school-music section also explicitly calls his song a “masterpiece,” says everyone loves him, and frames other performers as envious people trying to take his “throne of fame.”

Gosh, he started to remind us of Bashura/Never from The Original Human Beings by Dr. Timothy D. White. They have almost the same arc.

This book needs definitely needs some work before it could stand alongside the strongest OCA fiction entries. The prose is constantly telling readers that Junky is brilliant, gifted, handsome, charismatic, special, powerful, and admired. The story would be much stronger if it trusted readers to reach those conclusions through his choices, relationships, and sacrifices. Repetition, overdescription, word-choice issues, sentence-level errors, and extremely formal dialogue regularly slow the book down.

The shifts in scale and tone also need more grounding. A story about thirteen-year-olds suddenly involving M-16s, a warehouse full of mercenaries, dozens of deaths, magical police evidence, and a school concert with a crowd of roughly one hundred thousand can work in fantasy. But the world needs clearer rules early on so the reader understands whether Bongosland is an intentionally exaggerated alternate reality, a hidden magical society, or a more realistic setting that has suddenly become fantastical.

The handling of a certain character's s*xual abuse also needs more care. The book ultimately confirms that a villain coerced and r*ped this character, rather than presenting their relationship as consensual. That is important. However, too much of the material is initially filtered through Junky’s jealousy, his sense of ownership, and his questions about what her experience means for him. This character deserves more interiority, agency, recovery, and space as a person dealing with trauma, not merely as the answer to Junky’s romantic longing. It almost seems like she suffers to further elevate Junky as a good person and a hero. That didn't sit well with us.

We think there's an unwritten rule in fiction that we often advocate for: if you don't need to have r*pe or s*xual abuse in your fictional work, don't have it. It's not necessary to tell a story or develop characters most of the time. It's overdone. And it seems like kinda a cheap way to get heat on the villain and sympathy for the victim and hero.

Compounding things, this book sporadically features foul language and expletives. That'd be perfectly fine under most circumstances. We're not prudes. However, this is a fantasy story about a 13 year old boy featuring werewolves and a ghostly figure with a pointy white hat and a squeaky voice. In other words, isn't this supposed to be a teen or young-adult novel? Why are we busting out this language, M16s, and r*pe/s*xual abuse? If you're gonna do that, why not write a book about college-aged students or adults? It doesn't seem to fit. And on that note, why does the character on the cover look like he's 30 when he's supposed to be 13?

It's not all bad. The author was definitely imaginative and ambitious. They definitely took risks.

The best way to read this book is as an extremely heightened, almost mythic version of adolescence. Every ordinary teenage feeling becomes enormous. A crush becomes destiny. Bullying becomes warfare. A school rivalry becomes a supernatural conspiracy. A talent show becomes a stadium-scale coronation. That sheer commitment is exceptional.

Check it out on Amazon!