Ben Brooks’ book LOLITO  (Canongate) is puppy love in the age of porno and chat rooms, a brilliant blend of puberty blues and bravado, cut with vulnerability.

Unlike the predatory pedophilia that permeates TAMPA, LOLITO is a lovely, laugh out loud orchid to the awkward, a bouquet of barbed WiFi to the cyber sex set.

Taking its cue and title from Nabakov’s wicked Lolita, LOLITO presents fifteen year old Etgar who has a bestie called Aslam and a dog called Amundsen. He has two parents who have given him a stable home environment. They are away during the narrative, leaving their son to rule the roost, watch mindless television, drink rum and coke and surf the net.

Feeling like a coin lost down the sofa, Etgar has recently split up with his girlfriend, Alice, after she had been unfaithful. It hits Etgar hard, eliciting morbid love poetry and homicidal fantasies. He seeks solace on the n

et and hooks up with Macy, a bored housewife from Scotland.

The anonymity of their tryst is cast asunder when Macy pushes for a meet and their implied intimacy becomes hilarious, poignant reality. An inheritance from a grandparent pays the way for a stay in a London hotel. It’s interesting to note that the nana who left the legacy for the love tryst also lived in Scotland and took a toyboy as her spouse.

This story could have been grubby and sensationalist, instead it is strangely sweet and sensational. “the thing that makes me do heavy weather most is when you see someone and you can tell they want to be not alone and you know you want to be not alone but you can’t be not-alone together because of things like how she’s forty-two and you’re fifteen, or how she’s got kids and your mum’s waiting for you at home…It’s fucking retarded.”

Literary lineage maybe Lolita out of The Graduate, with a dash of Summer of ’42, but Ben Brooks creation is wonderfully original, brilliantly capturing the mind set and social milieu of the millennium enders/century starters that tweet and text, log on and boot up. LOLITO lol!