To cut, skip, play hooky
"Do you hear that, Bart? That was the tardy bell. Truant! Truant! Truant, they'll all say!" -- Milhouse, The Simpsons, "Homer vs. Patty and Selma"
Truancy
by Isamu Fukui
I'm sure someone will respond to this review by saying, "He's 17! What did *you* do when you were 17?"
And I'll say it. I did my homework and played live-action Vampire and I hung out at pizza places and I watched a lot of MTV, but I certainly did not write a novel. Hell, I'm 27 now and I still haven't written a novel, or published any fiction, period.
So I have to give him props. He put in the time and the effort and now he's got a novel on store shelves. So let's consider that. Someone considered the book good enough to publish, and thought that someone would read it. And I've read it, and now I will review it as I would any other novel.
I think it's a good concept - a totalitarian dystopia where school is the ultimate tool to control and mold the citizens of the city. Everything in the student's life - from the rules of conduct to the test-taking and even the subway schedule (or lack thereof) - are designed to demoralize students so that they will become passive, obedient members of the community. It's a very adolescent fantasy, and I'm sure all of us have experienced the feeling of not being in control but being blamed for what happens anyway. It's the very nature of school.
However, I don't really think we got a good look at the functioning of this dystopia. There's maybe only two or three chapters where the characters exist within the system, and then we start to break out of it. It would have been better to stay with the system so we could get to know it better and really learn to despise it, show our protagonist's growing discontent, and then finally break free. But instead, the table starts to wobble really early in the book, and the end of part 1 just flips it over, so we can spend most of the book hating the Truancy (the resistance) instead.
The Truancy are self-righteous and bloodthirsty, and they piss me the hell off. I know there should be some lesson about moral ambiguity in there, but since we didn't spend much time on the other side of the fence, they look a lot worse than the regime they're fighting. The regime steps up their tactics into the truly despicable, but to be fair, it's all in response to what the Truancy did first. I read that Fukui is writing a prequel, but I shouldn't need another book to achieve what this book was supposed to do.
So the book enters the actual plot phase, which consists of lots and lots of sword-fighting, gunplay, and explosions. If I didn't know the author was 15 (at the time he wrote this) I could have guessed from the adolescent glee of it all. It's just fight scene after fight scene, with some talking and thin plot development in between, which leads into the next fight scene. And the fights usually involve a lot of kicking, where people give "powerful kicks" or are kicked "forcefully." There's not a lot of variety in the language, and even when it's not word-for-word repetitive, it still feels that way. The vocabulary is fine, but the overall structure still needs a lot of work.
The dialogue is also just as stilted. When the characters talk it feels very unnatural, very stiff and formal, even when it's between peers. Now, it could be that some of this formality is a lingering effect of the societal indoctrination, but everyone talks that way, including the members of the Truancy. What would have been good was if the students still in school talked formal and stilted (with the occasional break to show that they aren't completely broken), while the students who have become Truants talked more casual, with more slang and so forth. Think Sandra Bullock vs. Denis Leary in Demolition Man, where Bullock's character had this annoying habit of saying people's full names all the time while Denis Leary was... well, Denis Leary. And as the characters [in Truancy] start to break free, he could have made it so that their patterns of speech start to change in subtle ways.
The most formal and awkward of all the characters in the book are the leader of the Truancy, Zyid, and the protagonist's mentor, Umasi. They're both incredibly intelligent with strong wills, and they're both extraordinary (bordering on superhuman) fighters. Both are almost unreal, which really detracts from the basic helplessness that the main character, Tack, should be feeling.
It should be noted that Zyid wears a windbreaker "pinned around his neck like a cape" and well, that's what it looks like Fukui is wearing in his author photo. And uh, "Umasi" is "Isamu" spelled backwards. Projecting much? Did I really just spend two days of my life reading a Mary Sue? Why didn't I throw this book against the wall? It's certainly heavy enough to make a loud thump. Did it need to be 400 pages? Did the story warrant 400 pages?
It's basically a cheesy Hong Kong film shoved into the framework of teenage rebellion against government and system. Which I point out, is a very popular theme recently. Cory Doctorow just released Little Brother, and most notably, there's Scott Westerfeld with the Uglies series (which I've reviewed before). But unfortunately, I have to say Uglies was done much better - more time is given over to the world, and even as our protagonist starts to break out of the system, the reminders that it exists are much more prominent, reminding us *why* we're on her side. Westerfeld's dialogue is also much better, as he took care to create unique dialogue for the society as a whole and the different castes in it. But Westerfeld is an established writer, he knows about all the little things you have to take care of in order to make a book work.
So it comes back down to age. Fukui wrote Truancy when he was 15, and now it's been published when he's 17. So that probably means that only a year or so passed between it getting picked up, which really isn't a lot of time for him to grow as a writer. I feel like he should have put it aside and come back to it years later, to polish and refine it into something more sophisticated. He says in the jacket copy that it's important for him to be in school to write about it, and that's a point, but in writing the novel he already had the basic ideas down, the feel of school. That part was fine. It was the actual execution that needed work, and that kind of thing is something you learn with time.
I don't put the blame on Fukui, though. corneredangel said his editor must have given him a break. And I could see that even from the length of the book - a first-time novel that's 400 pages? Crazy! But there were moments where a strong, experienced editorial hand was severely lacking.
It feels too often that publishers decide to use an author's age as a selling point in the book and don't pay much attention to the content - the Opal Mehta scandal was another example of this. I don't doubt that Fukui's work is original, I just wish it was better originality.
Truancy
by Isamu Fukui
I'm sure someone will respond to this review by saying, "He's 17! What did *you* do when you were 17?"
And I'll say it. I did my homework and played live-action Vampire and I hung out at pizza places and I watched a lot of MTV, but I certainly did not write a novel. Hell, I'm 27 now and I still haven't written a novel, or published any fiction, period.
So I have to give him props. He put in the time and the effort and now he's got a novel on store shelves. So let's consider that. Someone considered the book good enough to publish, and thought that someone would read it. And I've read it, and now I will review it as I would any other novel.
I think it's a good concept - a totalitarian dystopia where school is the ultimate tool to control and mold the citizens of the city. Everything in the student's life - from the rules of conduct to the test-taking and even the subway schedule (or lack thereof) - are designed to demoralize students so that they will become passive, obedient members of the community. It's a very adolescent fantasy, and I'm sure all of us have experienced the feeling of not being in control but being blamed for what happens anyway. It's the very nature of school.
However, I don't really think we got a good look at the functioning of this dystopia. There's maybe only two or three chapters where the characters exist within the system, and then we start to break out of it. It would have been better to stay with the system so we could get to know it better and really learn to despise it, show our protagonist's growing discontent, and then finally break free. But instead, the table starts to wobble really early in the book, and the end of part 1 just flips it over, so we can spend most of the book hating the Truancy (the resistance) instead.
The Truancy are self-righteous and bloodthirsty, and they piss me the hell off. I know there should be some lesson about moral ambiguity in there, but since we didn't spend much time on the other side of the fence, they look a lot worse than the regime they're fighting. The regime steps up their tactics into the truly despicable, but to be fair, it's all in response to what the Truancy did first. I read that Fukui is writing a prequel, but I shouldn't need another book to achieve what this book was supposed to do.
So the book enters the actual plot phase, which consists of lots and lots of sword-fighting, gunplay, and explosions. If I didn't know the author was 15 (at the time he wrote this) I could have guessed from the adolescent glee of it all. It's just fight scene after fight scene, with some talking and thin plot development in between, which leads into the next fight scene. And the fights usually involve a lot of kicking, where people give "powerful kicks" or are kicked "forcefully." There's not a lot of variety in the language, and even when it's not word-for-word repetitive, it still feels that way. The vocabulary is fine, but the overall structure still needs a lot of work.
The dialogue is also just as stilted. When the characters talk it feels very unnatural, very stiff and formal, even when it's between peers. Now, it could be that some of this formality is a lingering effect of the societal indoctrination, but everyone talks that way, including the members of the Truancy. What would have been good was if the students still in school talked formal and stilted (with the occasional break to show that they aren't completely broken), while the students who have become Truants talked more casual, with more slang and so forth. Think Sandra Bullock vs. Denis Leary in Demolition Man, where Bullock's character had this annoying habit of saying people's full names all the time while Denis Leary was... well, Denis Leary. And as the characters [in Truancy] start to break free, he could have made it so that their patterns of speech start to change in subtle ways.
The most formal and awkward of all the characters in the book are the leader of the Truancy, Zyid, and the protagonist's mentor, Umasi. They're both incredibly intelligent with strong wills, and they're both extraordinary (bordering on superhuman) fighters. Both are almost unreal, which really detracts from the basic helplessness that the main character, Tack, should be feeling.
It should be noted that Zyid wears a windbreaker "pinned around his neck like a cape" and well, that's what it looks like Fukui is wearing in his author photo. And uh, "Umasi" is "Isamu" spelled backwards. Projecting much? Did I really just spend two days of my life reading a Mary Sue? Why didn't I throw this book against the wall? It's certainly heavy enough to make a loud thump. Did it need to be 400 pages? Did the story warrant 400 pages?
It's basically a cheesy Hong Kong film shoved into the framework of teenage rebellion against government and system. Which I point out, is a very popular theme recently. Cory Doctorow just released Little Brother, and most notably, there's Scott Westerfeld with the Uglies series (which I've reviewed before). But unfortunately, I have to say Uglies was done much better - more time is given over to the world, and even as our protagonist starts to break out of the system, the reminders that it exists are much more prominent, reminding us *why* we're on her side. Westerfeld's dialogue is also much better, as he took care to create unique dialogue for the society as a whole and the different castes in it. But Westerfeld is an established writer, he knows about all the little things you have to take care of in order to make a book work.
So it comes back down to age. Fukui wrote Truancy when he was 15, and now it's been published when he's 17. So that probably means that only a year or so passed between it getting picked up, which really isn't a lot of time for him to grow as a writer. I feel like he should have put it aside and come back to it years later, to polish and refine it into something more sophisticated. He says in the jacket copy that it's important for him to be in school to write about it, and that's a point, but in writing the novel he already had the basic ideas down, the feel of school. That part was fine. It was the actual execution that needed work, and that kind of thing is something you learn with time.
I don't put the blame on Fukui, though. corneredangel said his editor must have given him a break. And I could see that even from the length of the book - a first-time novel that's 400 pages? Crazy! But there were moments where a strong, experienced editorial hand was severely lacking.
It feels too often that publishers decide to use an author's age as a selling point in the book and don't pay much attention to the content - the Opal Mehta scandal was another example of this. I don't doubt that Fukui's work is original, I just wish it was better originality.