Jack Baxter's Degree Of Exposure

Words: 438
Pages: 2

The book, Degree of Exposure by Eric Newman, is an unrestrained satirical composition glazed with doses of humor throughout its narrative. The novel is considered to be a work of fiction, first published in 2007 by AuthorHouse.

Jack Baxter is an aspiring writer, this, of course, serves as his primary motivation for signing up for Frank O’Malley’s creative writing class. Frank’s teaching approach and blasé attitude of “writers write” has Jack doubting his qualifications for the course. What’s worse, his lecturer seems to have an undefined romantic relationship with his stunningly beautiful classmate, Janice Mitchell, who, unfortunately also happens to be Jack’s object of affection. As a result, he finds himself rather contemptuous and dismissive of Frank. A class assignment to “write something funny” inspires him to amuse his crush by featuring her name and likeness as the heroine in his comic book; this gives him the much-needed confidence to challenge his instructor in more ways than one.
The author chose to refer to the main divisions of his book as ‘classes’ rather than ‘chapters,’ I thought this to be clever as it flowed with the narrative and
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What’s even better is that the writer used humor to narrate their stories and interactions. An odd factor in the book is when Ken Arnstruther (one of Jack’s comic book characters) stumbles on to Janice’s car and immediately decides to wire it so that he can drive it to town without asking for permission. What is more strange, was Janice’s’ reaction as she appeared cool and unbothered by the fact that this man that she was just getting to know, took her car (actually her brother’s) without asking! In my opinion, this doesn’t seem like a normal reaction most people would have which made the characters feel a little less realistic to me keeping in mind that, that bit of the story had no comical