A gaggle of disabled and otherwise different teens have their friendship tested by jealousy and hip-hop exclusionism in this gonzo young-adult fable.
Handicaps are spectacular but never encumbering among the students at the Green Rainbow Acres State School, located at the allegorical intersection of Truth Ave. and Pain St. in the slum district of Valley City. Bryan has Down syndrome, but he’s quick-witted and deep. Janice doesn’t let her muscular dystrophy get in the way of her high-falutin’ speechifying. Carlos, who has lost three limbs to three separate freak accidents, uses his toes to invent electronic gadgets. Moon is a black-belt in Aikido and a sound-and-lighting engineer for stage shows despite being deaf, mute and blind. Then there are the socially and psychologically disadvantaged: Mad Girl, truculent and pregnant; Learoy, truculent and pretty; Pho, huge and gentle; Dutch, white and stupid. Their tight, multicultural, stridently tolerant clique is disrupted by wheelchair-bound rap star MC Crippled Crip; while Janice and Learoy fall to cat-fighting for MC’s affections, Carlos, who complains that a Mexican-American rapper like himself can’t get a hearing in the hip-hop industry, insists that MC is a fraud who stole his lyrics. (Sample plagiarism: “Girl with that ass of yours / You won me from the start.”) The book’s somewhat cumbersome and avowedly silly narrative—“Beware, Mateys! Here thar be plot holes!”—functions as a lurid peg for eternal adolescent-lit themes: phoniness and authenticity; tensions between personal ambition and solidarity with friends; vague anti-establishment resentments; the centrality of rap culture to self-expression and group bonding. The writing, vigorous and suffused with urban rhythms but also coarse and platitudinous, soaks readers in profanity, flights of fancy (a Carlos-Crip showdown is staged as a faux-Clint Eastwood gunfight), bland moralizing (“‘It’s all about trust’”) and a nigh-obsessive ogling of Learoy’s bodacious (and underage) breasts and booty. The result is an imaginative, quirky read, but it’s so cartoonish that it doesn’t quite ring true. An exuberant but overblown tale of miraculous misfits.
Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0979893490
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Truth and Pain, LLC
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fable about the consolatory and strengthening powers of religion flounders about somewhere inside this unconventional coming-of-age tale, which was shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Award. The story is told in retrospect by Piscine Molitor Patel (named for a swimming pool, thereafter fortuitously nicknamed “Pi”), years after he was shipwrecked when his parents, who owned a zoo in India, were attempting to emigrate, with their menagerie, to Canada. During 227 days at sea spent in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger (mostly with the latter, which had efficiently slaughtered its fellow beasts), Pi found serenity and courage in his faith: a frequently reiterated amalgam of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian beliefs. The story of his later life, education, and mission rounds out, but does not improve upon, the alternately suspenseful and whimsical account of Pi’s ordeal at sea—which offers the best reason for reading this otherwise preachy and somewhat redundant story of his Life.
Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100811-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
With lantern-lit tales of old China, a rich humanity, and an acute ear for bicultural tuning, a splendid first novel—one...
An inordinately moving, electric exploration of two warring cultures fused in love, focused on the lives of four Chinese women—who emigrated, in their youth, at various times, to San Francisco—and their very American 30-ish daughters.
Tan probes the tension of love and often angry bewilderment as the older women watch their daughters "as from another shore," and the daughters struggle to free themselves from maddening threads of arcane obligation. More than the gap between generations, more than the dwindling of old ways, the Chinese mothers most fear that their own hopes and truths—the secret gardens of the spirit that they have cultivated in the very worst of times—will not take root. A Chinese mother's responsibility here is to "give [my daughter] my spirit." The Joy Luck Club, begun in 1939 San Francisco, was a re-creation of the Club founded by Suyuan Woo in a beleaguered Chinese city. There, in the stench of starvation and death, four women told their "good stories," tried their luck with mah-jongg, laughed, and "feasted" on scraps. Should we, thought Suyuan, "wait for death or choose our own happiness?" Now, the Chinese women in America tell their stories (but not to their daughters or to one another): in China, an unwilling bride uses her wits, learns that she is "strong. . .like the wind"; another witnesses the suicide of her mother; and there are tales of terror, humiliation and despair. One recognizes fate but survives. But what of the American daughters—in turn grieved, furious, exasperated, amused ("You can't ever tell a Chinese mother to shut up")? The daughters, in their confessional chapters, have attempted childhood rebellions—like the young chess champion; ever on maternal display, who learned that wiles of the chessboard did not apply when opposing Mother, who had warned her: "Strongest wind cannot be seen." Other daughters—in adulthood, in crises, and drifting or upscale life-styles—tilt with mothers, one of whom wonders: "How can she be her own person? When did I give her up?"
With lantern-lit tales of old China, a rich humanity, and an acute ear for bicultural tuning, a splendid first novel—one that matches the vigor and sensitivity of Maxine Hong Kingston (The Warrior Woman, 1976; China Men, 1980) in her tributes to the abundant heritage of Chinese-Americans.Pub Date: March 22, 1989
ISBN: 0143038095
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1989
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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