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WORK TITLE: POINT OF VIEW
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NATIONALITY: French
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PERSONAL
Born in France.
ADDRESS
CAREER MIILITARY:
Novelist, travel writer, journalist, and photojournalist.
AWARDS:Michel-Lebrun Award for the best detective novel, 2002, for La Frontiere.
WRITINGS
Has written articles for French and international newspapers and magazines about the United States-Mexico border.
Some of Bard’s novels in French have been adapted for the theater.
SIDELIGHTS
Patrick Bard is a French writer and photographer. He is the author of numerous articles published in both the U.S. and in France, and has published award-winning books in both fiction and nonfiction in France. His young adult novel, Point of View, is the first to be translated into English, and one that deals with a controversial topic: addiction to porn.
Lucas, a young teen, is at the center of Point of View. While searching for a superhero video online, a link to a porn video pops up instead. The images captivate and arouse the youth, and soon he is seeking out porn day and night. He gains weight, avoids friends, and does poorly at school. Then, when his laptop is taken over with viruses and sent in for repairs, his viewing history is revealed and his porn compulsion exposed to his parents. With his online world in shambles, Lucas’s real world also falls apart when his parents, disgusted at his behavior, take away all his devices. Things go from bad to worse when Lucas makes a failed attempt at suicide, jumping out of a speeding car. Ultimately, Lucas is entered into a recovery center for teens. Therapy ultimately helps, but it is an arduous process, finally proving successful when he is able to establish a healthy relationship with a female his age.
A Kirkus Reviews critic termed Point of View a “provocative work that could have been more nuanced.” A similar mixed assessment was offered by a Publishers Weekly reviewer who concluded: “The story’s journalistic quality may be off-putting to some, but Bard’s exposure of a universal, rarely discussed issue is commendable.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews September 15, 2019, review of Point of View.
ONLINE
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (October 10, 2019), review of Point of View.
Publishers Weekly Shelftalk, http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/ (May 2, 2019), Kenny Brechner, “A Point of View on Point of View.”
PATRICK BARD is a novelist, travel writer, and photojournalist. His many novels for adults and young adults have received prestigious awards in his native France. Point of View is his first novel to be translated into English.
Born in France, Patrick Bard is a journalist and a professional photographer who has written articles for the French and international presses about the issue of the border between Mexico and the United States. Bard is the author of several nouvelles, some of which have been adapted for the theatre. "La Frontiere "received the 2002 Michel-Lebrun Award for the best detective novel.
QUOTE:
provocative work that could have been more nuanced.
Bard, Patrick POINT OF VIEW Delacorte (Young Adult Fiction) $17.99 12, 10 ISBN: 978-1-9848-5176-5
Translated from French, Bard's English-language debut depicts a 16-year-old boy who has an addiction to pornography.
Lucas Delveau spends hours each day holed up in his room watching porn. He forgoes basic hygiene, gains weight, starts doing poorly in school, and avoids friends. He's also sworn off all interactions with girls ever since he fantasized about a schoolmate named Samira, then sent her an unsolicited naked photo and she reacted negatively. (Later, a therapist brushes off this unwanted sexual advance as merely "clumsy"). His parents find out about his porn habit and take away his devices. In a suicide attempt, Lucas jumps out of a fast-moving car and gets sent to inpatient rehab. The narrative jarringly switches between the perspectives of Lucas and his father (and occasionally his mother), all presumed white. Lucas' parents' points of view highlight their obliviousness and disgust with their son's porn use. Lucas' father says, "He makes me want to puke. He's a pig." While the author tries to distinguish between human rights abuses in exploitative porn versus feminist productions, problems unique to the digital age versus the experiences of earlier generations, and healthy expressions of sexuality versus addiction by an underage viewer, the distinctions could have been made clearer. Some of the language also presents a derogatory attitude toward fat people.
A provocative work that could have been more nuanced. (author's note) (Fiction. 14-18)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bard, Patrick: POINT OF VIEW." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599964361/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fcf90151. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A599964361
A Point of View on ‘Point of View’
Kenny Brechner -- May 2nd, 2019Leave a reply
Two ARC towers along with pedestrian traffic.
When I’m prepping for a sales call we pull all the ARCs for that list and set them up in piles like mini skyscrapers. I start at the roof and have a look through each floor of the continually shrinking building until we are back down to the foundation which, in an inspired architectural stroke, was crafted to resemble a wooden stool.
I was going through the Random House fall piles last week when a book in the pile brought me up short, Point of View by Patrick Bard. The tagline was “Addicted to Porn. Powerless to Stop. Until…” My first thought was, “Wow, that was bold.” My second thought was twofold. Could I put this out in the store without incident? (We’ll return to that shortly.) Would school libraries bring it in? My third thought was “Is it good?” Which is the nub of the matter.
A local high school librarian I queried addressed that point succinctly. “In the end it will be all about whether or not it is done well. I probably wouldn’t buy it for our library, mostly because I don’t think kids would choose it. They would assume if we had that book at school it must be a morality tale and not realistic, plus there’s the embarrassment factor of even having it around teachers and peers. I’m always hesitant of the “first of its kind” book on any trending issue because it seems like publishers usually have to make a few mistakes before they get it right. On that topic you would have to walk a very fine line between realistic (but not sensational) and helpful (but not scolding).”
Other librarians I spoke with had the same reaction. This was a topic that would require threading the needle. It had to be done well. I read Point of View and found that the book is exactly the book my school partners thought it had to be. It is well written, not preachy, realistic without being gratuitous, grounded and not sensational, well researched, compact and compelling. The author, Patrick Bard, is a well established, award-winning French author who has never been translated into English before. The translator, Françoise Bui, was executive editor at Delacorte for 20 years. Four of the novels in translation she worked on at Random House won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award. This was clearly not a case of opportunism, of finding a topic that hadn’t been handled before and looking to capitalize on it and spin it into sales. This was a work of quality by a team with integrity.
The story follows Lucas, a young teen, who is searching for a superhero video clip online, hits a porn link, and falls down the rabbit hole. When his virus-ridden laptop is given over for repair, Lucas is exposed. The story explores the perspectives of Lucas’s parents as well, in a tough, unsentimental manner. With all his devices taken away, his physical health in the toilet, and while being driven to a clinic, Lucas literally jumps out of a speeding car. He enters the clinic recovering from injuries of many kinds.
Bard researched his story extensively, talking to teenagers and teachers, clinicians, anthropologists, and psychologists. In his author’s note Bard states, “Lucas is the hero of Point of View. On the outside, he seems like an average teenage geek. At least that’s what his parents believe him to be. But once his outline addiction to porn is revealed, his virtual world crumbles, and so does he. He’s got a long, hard journey to being a whole person again. As I wrote this book, I did not want to make judgments. I have not judged Lucas. I have not judged his parents. I have not judged any of the characters. I merely want readers to have empathy for Lucas and be aware that help and recovery are possible.”
All right then. Since the book is indeed the stuff, what now? One of the most powerful aspects of Point of View is the difficulty Lucas has, even in a clinical setting with other teens who have addictive disorders like gaming addiction, admitting why he personally is there. At the same time that constriction is a prison for Lucas and he doesn’t truly escape his stasis until he opens up about it to a girl he has formed a connection with. Given the intrinsic shame-driven, stigmatic nature of the subject matter, how might a bookseller wishing to succeed in selling the book on the store floor proceed?
I queried some bookselling pals and got some great feedback. I found that everyone recognized the importance of the topic, but that shelving ideas varied greatly depending on many factors, how progressive their community was, whether teens tended to shop with or without parents, whether the store tended to use informational shelf talkers to provide content information, whether the store segregated issue books as a genre, and so forth. I don’t have any easy answers as to marketing the book but I do think it is a topic which, with an excellent fictional treatment in hand, should be given our best shot.
As to DDG’s best shot, Farmington is in a rural area and has a mix of parents of teens and teens shopping the YA section. There are some progressive families here but it is not San Francisco. We have 17 churches in a town of 5,000 residents. When I was tossing the question around I ignobly considered bringing the book in and putting it in parenting, but realized that was a cop-out because no one would ever come in and ask for a book on that topic, so having it on hand but isolated was no better than not having it at all. In the end, I think the use of a Staff Recommendation shelftalker with information on the quality of the story and its integrity as a resource is the best move. We’ll see when I have an update on how things went!
QUOTE:
"The story’s journalistic quality may be off-putting to some, but Bard’s exposure of a universal, rarely discussed issue is commendable."
Point of View
Patrick Bard, trans. from the French by Françoise Bui. Delacorte, $17.99 (192p) ISBN 978-1-9848-5176-5
Growing up in Chartres, teen Lucas has been addicted to online porn for years. Despite blatant warning signs that he is in trouble (falling grades, antisocial behavior), he manages to keep the truth hidden from everyone until his computer crashes. While his father’s friend is making repairs, Lucas’s browsing history is revealed, and his stunned parents are at a loss about what to do. In his first YA novel to be translated into English, French writer Bard tackles a provocative subject with objectivity and unabashed honesty. His reporterlike narrative stays focused on facts, allowing readers to form their own judgments about characters and their decisions. Relevant to adults as well as adolescents, the book examines how Lucas’s curiosity about sex evolves into an obsession, how his image of women becomes warped, and how his addiction pays a toll on his parents’ marriage. After he enters a specialized center for teens, Lucas’s recovery is a slow, arduous process, but the benefits of intense therapy are clear as he experiences his first healthy relationship with a female peer. The story’s journalistic quality may be off-putting to some, but Bard’s exposure of a universal, rarely discussed issue is commendable. Ages 14–up. (Dec.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on : 10/10/2019
Release date: 12/10/2019
Genre: Children's