Skippy Dies

Skippy Dies is a darkly comic novel that captures the angst and weirdness of being a teenager (as well as teaching teenagers).

Continuing in a long line of acerbic Irish authors, Paul Murray pulls no punches as he describes life at an Irish boarding school. Skippy Dies pulls you into the lives of its many characters, almost all of whom are hilarious sad sacks trying to work their own perverse angle.

There is one section—in which they try to open a portal to other dimensions and send a toy Optimus Prime into the portal as an advance scout—that I found… show more.

Skippy Dies is nearly 700 pages long, but I wished it had been longer, it was that fun to read. It’s both tragically sad and laugh-out-loud funny—a difficult feat for any writer to pull off, and Irish novelist Paul Murray does so brilliantly. I’m not giving away anything by saying that the protagonist dies—after all, he dies in the book’s title—but I won’t reveal how or the circumstances. Let’s just say that if you are a diminutive, shy, buck-toothed 14-year-old at an all-boys boarding school in Dublin and somehow manage to develop a crush on the girlfriend of an older,… show more.