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Book Summary

Reviewed by Matt Berman

Rico looks white, but he's a Cuban living in Harlem in the '70s. A bright kid who loves to read, he is often picked on, sometimes beaten, doesn't feel he belongs anywhere, has a drunken father and an angry mother, and his only friend is turning into a junkie. There's little that's good in his life. So he decides to run away, dragging the junkie friend with him, and hitchhikes to Wisconsin, where an older friend from his neighborhood is living in a ramshackle farmhouse without running water. There he finds some peace and a gas-station job, but he can't go to school, and still doesn't know where he belongs.

Is It Any Good?

4

Pulitzer-winning author Oscar Hijuelos's first young adult book is really for older teens and adults. Its subject matter is unusual: a white Cuban boy from Harlem washing up on a run-down farm in Wisconsin. Though it runs more than 400 pages of not a lot happening in between small incidents of nasty violence, and has more coolness and emotional distance than most YA books, the pages fly by, and it's engrossing from beginning to end. They don't give that Pulitzer for nothing -- the man can write.

Aside from the flowing language, a lot of that has to do with Rico, a nice kid whose white skin color ensures that he'll never fit in with his own people, and who just wants to get along, get an education, and get out. Hijuelos adeptly sets Rico up in a no-win situation, then allows him a sort of winning, but at a cost that may be more than Rico is willing to go on paying. While few readers will relate directly to the particulars of his situation, most will relate to Rico himself, and his outsider status is universal.

From the Book:
Now picture me on my stoop, on a hot New York City summer afternoon, with two comic books -- a Spider-Man and a Fantastic Four -- rolled up in my back pocket and dying to be read. While some kids are playing stick-ball down the street, I'm fused to the stoop 'cause I'm supposed to be going to the A&P with my Moms, but she's been taking forever to get back from wherever she's been.

I'm on my former altar boy best behavior, despite the comics I've just "borrowed" from the stationery store, and I have a pious look on my face, the one I always put on while wishing I could be doing something really devious instead, like tossing water balloons or dumping out a full garbage can at unsuspecting strangers from the rooftop, stuff I never have the nerve to do.

So I was just sitting there when my pal Gilberto Flores, all six foot two of him, came bopping up the hill from Amsterdam Avenue, wearing the biggest grin I'd ever seen in my life.

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