b, Book and Me

 

My thoughts:

I wanted to "tag" this as a minority lit YA book, but it is not. This YA book is translated into English from its original Korean. The south Korean culture, the lived experience of its youth, the environment that these teens are growing up in seems contemporary, however, I am not sure if my shock is just part of my "Americanness." In other words, I felt that this story was so foreign to me and I found that I could not fully "translate" the story. That did not make it bad, just confusing. 

This is the story of poverty and coming of age, bullying and relationships that cannot be judged by American perspectives. I believe that it is my own ignorance that explains why it took so long to finish this. 

From the publisher:

Best friends b and Rang are all each other have. Their parents are absent, their teachers avert their eyes when they walk by. Everyone else in town acts like they live in Seoul even though it's painfully obvious they don’t. When Rang begins to be bullied horribly by the boys in baseball hats, b fends them off. But one day Rang unintentionally tells the whole class about b’s dying sister and how her family is poor, and each of them finds herself desperately alone. The only place they can reclaim themselves, and perhaps each other, is beyond the part of town where lunatics live―the End.

In a piercing, heartbreaking, and astonishingly honest voice, Kim Sagwa’s b, Book, and Me walks the precipice between youth and adulthood, reminding us how perilous the edge can be.