Whipping Boy author Allen Kurzweil is not the first, and
unfortunately not the last, to suffer at the hands of a childhood bully.
Kurzweil crossed paths with a boy named Cesar Augustus while attending Aiglon,
a Swiss boarding school. While he only spent a year there, Kurzweil found
several of the humiliations Augustus dished out to him so disturbing that the
memories haunted him into adulthood. These incidents included Augustus tossing
a watch Kurzweil inherited from his late father out the window. (While he
didn’t witness this act, Kurzweil was sure that Augustus did it.) Something
even more bizarre occurred when Augustus repeatedly whipped Kurzweil while
playing a cassette of a particular scene of the Jesus Christ Superstar cast recording.
After Augustus appeared as one of the characters in
Kurzweil’s children’s book Leon and the
Spitting Image, he began to wonder what had happened to him in the
intervening years. Even with his unique name, Augustus proved difficult to
track down. Kurzweil eventually discovered that he was part of an incredibly
complicated loan scam involving, among other things, fake royalty. Celebrities
such as Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, and Ernest Borgnine were involved in the
scam and unraveling it steers a good chunk of the book into the true crime
genre.
Fact proves stranger than fiction in this engrossing read. After
years of tracking Augustus through court documents and online searches, Kurzweil
does eventually meet up with him. Like most of Whipping Boy, the oddness of Kurzweil’s long-awaited reunion with
his childhood bully shows that fact really can be stranger than fiction.
There are many, many ways to describe Karen White's newest novel,