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Oscar Hijuelos’s best-known novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, won a Pulitzer Prize, and its author has also been a National Book Award nominee and won some other fancy fellowships and grants. So it’s a good thing for his reputation, and his readers, that his first novel for young adults delivers.
Set in the 1960s, Dark Dude is told from the perspective of Rico Fuentes, a Cuban-American kid who looks different from everyone around him. As he puts it, “My Moms was a brunette with skin somewhere between cinnamon and café con leche. Ditto for my chubby little sister, Isabel. And my Pops had wavy dark hair and dark eyes. Then there was me. Hazel eyes, fair skin, and freckles, for God’s sakes! The odd one out. Even my cousins used to call me ‘blanquito’ and ‘Pinky.’” Rico’s family is hard on him, looking at him as if he “was some rich white kid, slumming it up with the spics in our apartment,” but they’re nice compared to the kids at “Jo Mamma,” his Harlem high school. Things there are so bad that Rico stops going, preferring to read comic books and come up with concepts for strips of his own with his struggling junkie friend Jimmy. When Rico’s parents find out he’s been ditching school and threaten to send him to a military academy, he runs away to a hippie commune in Wisconsin, where he discovers that even in the “enchanted land of butter and milk and corn…all pretty and peaceful, and not even a discarded syringe anywhere in sight,” you can’t get away from human nature or your own true self.
Like Rico, Dark Dude is low key and laid back—an easy read despite its occasional violence, with a good sense of time and place and a lot of laughs—but hides surprising depths. Rico will never feel fully Latino or fully white, but like all of us, he can learn to be himself.
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The ORIGINAL Cup of Joe |
November 26, 2008i read part of itthe last time i was at borders and seriously...i wanted to take a pick axe to my eyes it was so shitty. |
The PrΩdigal SΩn |
November 26, 2008Twilight:the chick becomes a vampire at the end of the 4th book. Just saved you 20 hours of reading. You're welcome. |
Deborah |
November 25, 2008u were rightNot great at all! |
John |
November 24, 2008not commenting this one..it bores me... |
TH3 J0K3R [pa-TROLL-in] |
November 21, 2008and so did sarah GIGGIY GIGGITY GIGGITY GIGGITY GIGGITY |
The ORIGINAL Cup of Joe |
November 21, 2008itSUCKED |
Sarah!♥ |
November 19, 2008I wouldn't say it was horrible or great. Just okay. |
Orgasmic AhDumb |
November 04, 2008Grimm Reaperthats a very sensitive subject for me. A girl I had strong feelings for just cheated on me with her cousin a bit less than a week ago. |
The Grimm Ripper (PWNING and pa-TROLL-ing) |
November 02, 2008haha redneckzi guess its the inter breeding that makes them dumb hahaha |
The ORIGINAL Cup of Joe |
November 01, 2008hahahasilly country fag wannabe your opinions no longer matter HANG YOURSELF! |
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