Although Snapshots is a realistic book about an important series of episodes in the lives of two thirteen-year-old boys, it is full of humor. Often, however, the humor is grim, especially some of the humor involved in the hearing. Sean's father becomes overexcited, interrupting the proceedings several times, especially when he feels the lawyers may be intimidating his son. Once, when they ask Sean about pictures taken of him and Marsha naked when they were children, the father screams, "Who doesn't take pictures of babies like that?" Sean himself gets embarrassed when the lawyers ask him whether he has ever looked at pictures in Playboy magazine; he wishes his father were not present when he answers that he has.

Snapshots is a tale of initiation on at least two levels. First, Sean goes through a formal initiation process as he prepares for his bar mitzvah and...