17 year-old Isamu Fukui's first novel, Truancy (2008)
This is really sort of a rough draft for a review that I'll probably have to write for work. Truancy was one of the top twenty novels for young adults selected by the Young Adult Library Services Association:
Isamu Fukui was a 17 year-old senior at Stuyvesant High School in New York City when his first novel, Truancy, was published in 2008. Best I can figure, he wasn’t too crazy about his educational experience there. For one thing, he dedicates the book to “every student who has ever suffered in the name of education.” For another, the story centers around a powerful, nearly totalitarian city government that that is particularly focussed on controlling the lives of the students in the city schools.
The system has grown so repressive, a group of teen guerillas has started an armed and violent resistance to it. This initial set-up is a bit weak, frankly. I don’t recall any mention of a state or national government anywhere in the book. Fukui wants to set up a simple hero tale and is willing to sacrifice some realistic details to focus on that, creating instead a closed city environment, much as Kafka (in The Castle and The Trial) or Camus (The Plague) do for their own purposes. You just have to go with that much.
Where Fukui’s age shows most clearly is in the development of the characters. The most vivid characters by far are all teens. The adults aren’t particularly believable, nor in some ways are the teens, but they’re pretty colorful: Tack (or Takan, the hero, out to avenge his his sister’s death); his nemesis, Zyid; Noni, Zyid’s formidable right-hand female; Edward, a cool, deadly opportunist; and, coolest of all, the Yoda-like Omasi, a detached, enlightened teacher of wisdom and martial arts.
Speaking of which, there’s a lot of fighting in this book, and Fukui is at his best when he’s describing it. It’s not an easy accomplishment, relating the blow by blow of fight after fight without growing redundant or tedious. Far from that, it’s the fight scenes that make this book. They are so cinematically drawn, you expect to see them in some future film version, faithfully reproduced. Some are of the swashbuckling martial arts sorts, others more the military battle sort. Fukui excels at both.
Probably most kids fantasize at some point or other of attacking their school, but there really haven’t been too many fictional accounts of such. The one that comes to my mind is the Malcolm McDowell movie, If, which ends in an actual battle. This is that, multiplied many times.
If came out in 1968, just as campuses and cities around the globe erupted in violence. You don’t hear so many students complaining quite that vocally about their schools these days. Is Fukui’s tale foretelling something? Not sure. But maybe somebody ought to look into whatever the hell is going on at Stuyvesant High School. BTW, the prequel to the story, Truancy Origins came out in March, and there is definitely great potential for a sequel, as well.
Isamu Fukui was a 17 year-old senior at Stuyvesant High School in New York City when his first novel, Truancy, was published in 2008. Best I can figure, he wasn’t too crazy about his educational experience there. For one thing, he dedicates the book to “every student who has ever suffered in the name of education.” For another, the story centers around a powerful, nearly totalitarian city government that that is particularly focussed on controlling the lives of the students in the city schools.
The system has grown so repressive, a group of teen guerillas has started an armed and violent resistance to it. This initial set-up is a bit weak, frankly. I don’t recall any mention of a state or national government anywhere in the book. Fukui wants to set up a simple hero tale and is willing to sacrifice some realistic details to focus on that, creating instead a closed city environment, much as Kafka (in The Castle and The Trial) or Camus (The Plague) do for their own purposes. You just have to go with that much.
Where Fukui’s age shows most clearly is in the development of the characters. The most vivid characters by far are all teens. The adults aren’t particularly believable, nor in some ways are the teens, but they’re pretty colorful: Tack (or Takan, the hero, out to avenge his his sister’s death); his nemesis, Zyid; Noni, Zyid’s formidable right-hand female; Edward, a cool, deadly opportunist; and, coolest of all, the Yoda-like Omasi, a detached, enlightened teacher of wisdom and martial arts.
Speaking of which, there’s a lot of fighting in this book, and Fukui is at his best when he’s describing it. It’s not an easy accomplishment, relating the blow by blow of fight after fight without growing redundant or tedious. Far from that, it’s the fight scenes that make this book. They are so cinematically drawn, you expect to see them in some future film version, faithfully reproduced. Some are of the swashbuckling martial arts sorts, others more the military battle sort. Fukui excels at both.
Probably most kids fantasize at some point or other of attacking their school, but there really haven’t been too many fictional accounts of such. The one that comes to my mind is the Malcolm McDowell movie, If, which ends in an actual battle. This is that, multiplied many times.
If came out in 1968, just as campuses and cities around the globe erupted in violence. You don’t hear so many students complaining quite that vocally about their schools these days. Is Fukui’s tale foretelling something? Not sure. But maybe somebody ought to look into whatever the hell is going on at Stuyvesant High School. BTW, the prequel to the story, Truancy Origins came out in March, and there is definitely great potential for a sequel, as well.