Sixth Review - Dooley Takes the Fall

At-A-Glance
Title: Dooley Takes the Fall
Author: Norah McClintock
First Copyright Date: 2008
Genre: Teen Fiction
General Subject Matter: crime, murder, alcohol, drugs, conduct of life, self-acceptance
Interesting Facts: White Pine recipient, soaked with a certain four-letter word
Price: $14.95 CDN, or borrow it from MW’s library!






Dooley Takes the Fall, by Norah McClintock, surprised me. The way it started, I thought I would have to drag myself through it and would probably never finish it for a month. Then things changed for the better a little past the middle of the book. Some things still irked me, but the story line improved and I was more interested in what I was reading. I felt more and more connected to the characters and I realized I did care what happened in the end.

Dooley Takes the Fall is not an amazing book, but it wasn’t horrible either. Dooley has been in a whole lot of trouble before. He knows how it feels to be a suspect, and he knows what will happen if the cops find him guilty. But this time, Dooley didn’t do anything. When a kid’s suicide starts to look like a murder, Dooley becomes the suspect because he was the last person to see him alive. Then, Dooley has a fist fight with a kid who is not seen for days after, then found dead. On top of that, Dooley finds himself falling for the first dead kid’s sister, Beth. The only thing standing between Dooley and total disaster is his uncle, who is also starting to have his doubts.

Now, before you get too excited, Dooley is not the main character’s first name, but rather his surname. His first name is Ryan. Actually, a lot of characters in Dooley Takes the Fall are referred to by their last name. Peter Landers, Eddy Gillette, Winston Rhodes, Marcus Bracey, Mark Everley. I had to wonder why McClintock chose to do that. I also had to wonder about her again when “Sweet ‘n’ Low” was mentioned (Dooley’s uncle had taken his girlfriend’s Sweet ‘n’ Low when he was stressed). It’s become such a staple for old people’s coffee and tea; it’s also on the verge of becoming a cliché. Oh, I learned two new words from this book! Lobotomized (which means to deprive a [person] of energy or vitality) and malingering
(which means effort by an individual to continue to receive disability income benefits by taking a continuing sickness or injury)! Oh, and thanks to Laura, I did not have to wonder why a person being “anal” had something to do with being super-organized and had nothing whatsoever to do with one’s posterior.

Now come the bad parts. Dooley Takes the Fall was extremely slow and quite boring for the first half. I found myself not wanting to read the book at all. I even went straight to sleep one night instead of reading for an hour or two like I usually do. That’s a surprise. My mother asked me if I was okay. That’s how utterly boring it was. I didn’t even know what the setting was until four-fifths of the way through. Even then, it wasn’t exact...Dooley’s uncle had just said he was going “up to Timmins” so I’m guessing the setting is somewhere south of Timmins. There was not much character imagery. I had a small idea of what Beth, Dooley’s uncle, and Warren (another small character) look like. McClintock used the name Dooley way more than necessary. Dooley this, Dooley that...too much Dooley! It got really annoying. For example, “...what are the chances that Gillette would say anything to Dooley if Dooley asked? Mind you, Dooley had a little leverage”. See what I mean? It was also weird how Dooley’s uncle didn’t have a name. He was always referred to as “his uncle” or “Dooley’s uncle”. Then there’s Jeannie and Lorraine, who are minor characters and have no lines but they still have names. It made for very confusing dialogue. Also, Dooley and his uncle kept referring to their lawyer by her full name, Annette Girondin, and that was highly annoying. There was also bad sentence structure at times, so I had to re-read parts of the book over to make sure I read them correctly. There were so many run on sentences! I had to imagine my own periods here and there to take the places of the multitude of commas. I had difficulty reading between Dooley’s spoken words and his thoughts because there was no definite division and they were clustered together. I had to go back and seek out quotation marks and then re-read the paragraph.

Oh dear, when McClintock referred to a USB as a “data storage device” and “USB data device”, I had to laugh. That description made the USB sound like some kind of huge clunky thing from however far back a “data storage device” goes. This is a novel written for teens, we’re going to know what a USB is. “USB data device” is just two words too long. In one paragraph, Dooley had a string of names that I’m pretty sure were important to the story but I didn’t know who they
were. I had to go research them. That was a task I didn’t want to do. Definitions: okay, fine, not a problem; biographies: no, sorry. I didn’t appreciate the discrimination against pit bulls. Not all pit bulls are aggressive, and if they are, it is because their owners/breeders trained them that way...okay, that is all.

Oh, one more thing: THE WORD “CALL” WAS MISSPELLED ON PAGE 217.

There were more cons than pros in Dooley Takes the Fall.In the second half of the book, there were new developments in each chapter. It felt like a CSI episode, the way things just kept piling up and fitting together and falling apart, incriminating different people until you don’t know whodunit. There weren’t many parts that gave me a reaction. However, McClintock was describing the thrill of robbing a house, it really made me want to do it. I know, it’s bad, but the way it was described!!! For a second I had thought, “Seriously, what’s so wrong about it?” But then I decided that I’m an idiot and I shouldn’t listen to myself. Then there was a really sad part. Well, it was sad after I read it twice-over; I didn’t understand it the first time. Then there was this one part that elicited pure disgust and horror from me and was completely heart-wrenching. There was one funny part: proper USB ejection. If you read the book, you will know what I mean. Overall, I’d rate this book a 7 out of 10. The CSI-like plot with its twists and turns made up for some of the bad things like a boring beginning, confusing sentence structure, and a lack of character imagery. I was going to type up the house-robbing scene, but it is way too long. So here’s the sad part which you might not get...so read the book! :

“You should just buy her* that movie,” he [Dooley] said.
“What?”
“The penguin movie. The number of times she’s rented that one, she could have bought it already, plus another one.”
“If she owned it,” Warren said, “she wouldn’t have to come here and rent it every week.”
“My point,” Dooley said.
Warren shook his head. “She likes coming here. She likes to come and see Ryan. That’s you, right?” Like he still couldn’t believe it. “One of the reasons
they** were giving her a hard time,” he said, “is because of me. They told her, no wonder she’s the way she is, she has me for a brother.”

*The girl they are talking about is Warren’s sister Alicia, who has Down’s syndrome.

**”They” are Everett and Landers. They were taunting Alicia one day outside of the store where Dooley works


Norah McClintock is the author of over thirty novels for teens, including three different series. She is the five-time winner of the Crime Writers of

Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Juvenile Crime Novel. She now lives in Toronto with her family.
Find more about her and her books here: Norah McClintock