“Dacques, it’s time to get up! I’ve got a big surprise for you today.”
No one can possibly imagine the ominous impact those words had on me. Think of the worst possible feeling you’ve ever had upon being awakened. Multiply by ten. You’re still not even close.
The Bonjour Boys, a teenage romance and adventure, is a modern Ferris Cassady and the Swedish Kid set in a Texas high school.
Dacques Smith is a 17 year old social misfit, a cute, intelligent kid who can’t find his niche. His mother Nina, a Frenchwoman who came to the States with an American soldier who abandoned them after three years of marriage, decides that Dacques needs a friend, and orders up a French foreign exchange student. Through a bureaucratic screw-up, the French boy turns out to be Swedish. His saving grace is that he speaks French. The two boys become fast friends and wreak havoc at Rio Cibolo High. Every girl in the school takes an interest in the boys and many guys take an anti-interest. Dacques is thrilled by the attention, and even more thrilled when Amy, captain of the dance team and babe extraordinaire, is more interested in him than in Anders. Anders, flooded by female attention, invites a variety of girls to join him, Dacques and Amy as they sample South Texas teenage life.
Author’s Note:
A Swedish foreign exchange student in my Creative Writing class had the exact same effect on Texas high school girls that I describe in this book. They went crazy for his blondness, his accent, and his sense of wonder and innocence. The boy he stayed with enjoyed the same kind of ripple effect that Dacques does, too.
This might be my favorite book. In teaching quarters, there’s a constant barrage of disparaging remarks about teenage boys, and in Dacques I wanted to illuminate the positive things I saw. This was also the book that made me realize that I had fallen in love with Texas.
Ironically, this book was once accepted for publication by an East Coast publishing house, G.P. Putnam. I had a New York agent at the time, and he suggested we table the deal and show them The Sixties Kid, my next book which I had just completed. Then we would sell both books in a package deal, and I would become one of Putnam’s “house authors.” Unfortunately, the market for Contemporary Young Adult was drying up at that time (I suspect R.L. Stine and Sweet Valley High ruined my career!), and Putnam rejected The Sixties Kid and withdrew the offer for The Bonjour Boys. I don’t have that agent anymore.
