The Devil's Toenail -- Sally Prue

Kind of like that Sonya Sones book, I would have liked this book much more if it wasn't by Sally Prue.  I loved Cold Tom so much that this book didn't really have a chance at completely winning my heart.

It's a good book, and worth reading.  But I still think that Cold Tom was better, even though they were completely different books and probably shouldn't even be compared.

The story is told by Stevie, a boy who wants to join a gang in his school (not like a GANG-gang, just a group of boys that, for the most part, hang about and cause minor-ish trouble--graffiti and whatnot.  Although one of them is a bit of a bad seed.  Actually, he might really BE the bad seed). 

Stevie finds a fossil at the beach, one that is commonly called a "devil's toenail" (he draws a picture of it rather than taking the time to describe it to the reader, which I thought was a nice touch--it made it seem as if the whole book was being written as an assignment of some sort, maybe for school or for a psychiatrist), and he discovers that it gives him power:

Right.  Now I had power.  Lots and lots of power.

And somehow it was as if a small voice inside me was whispering: Think revenge.

The power was like a bud: quite suddenly it opened up all round me, so big that things went out of focus and made me dizzy.  And the small voice inside me was saying, You can have whatever you want: and it was showing me pictures of all the different things I could do.

But there's more to Stevie than he lets on at first, and as the story progresses, he gives the reader more and more information. 

Anyway.  The reason I never told Mum and Dad about being picked on was the humiliation.  Because, you see, Mum and Dad think I'm all right.  The way parents do.  And Mum would have been really upset and angry.  And she would have wanted to go up to the school, and that would have only made things worse.  Because everything made things worse.

As things progress, you start to wonder if the fossil is truly powerful in some way...  or if Stevie is going slightly mad.

It was a great book about bullying, which is a topic that has been pretty much done to death in the YA realm, but Sally Prue does it in a new way.  It ends up being much more than just a book about bullies.