cover image Foreign Exchange

Foreign Exchange

George Dardess. Austen Press, $9.95 (139pp) ISBN 978-0-9638052-9-4

Alvin Spratt's mother, a weepy religious woman, decides to take in Rudi, an unusual ``German'' exchange student, to her son's confusion and despair: Rudi appears to be a dog. However, some people--Mrs. Spratt, Mr. Perkins, the high school principal and some of the teachers at Alvin's school--inexplicably see in Rudi a bright young teenager with potential. This confusion continues as Rudi's classmates reject him, only to decide to play along when the principal severely reprimands the student body for treating their new four-legged classmate like a dog. Rudi undergoes a slow transformation into a squeaky clean, almost noble, multitalented student, whom his fellow students come to love--and just as suddenly, he is transformed back to dog form. Rudi's baffling presence provides a platform for the young characters to melodramatically investigate their relations with one another. But Dardess's tale collapses under the weight of its unconvincing and ploddingly earnest plot, his exceptionally sensitive and skillfully rendered black-and-white drawings wasted on this pretentious text. Dardess coauthored Every Cliche in the Book . (Feb. )