Friday, March 17, 2006

Random Family


I was prepared to hate this book; I hate anything that perpetuates stereotypes especially about my race. Sadly though in my mother’s words “stereotypes often are based on a kernel of truth. Truth that’s not pretty but we’re all affected by it by the bendeja (bull) of a few. It’s how we are perceived by outsiders who don’t know any better“

Have you ever read a book that has made you yell at the characters?
I’ve just finished reading “Random Family” by Adrian Nicole Le Blanc, and am exhausted and crying. The book is mentally draining but in a good way, if you can understand what I’m saying. Random Family has angered me and made me cry. It has made me want to bitch slap some of the characters and counsel some of the others. It reminded me of the exact reason I’ve chosen the field that I am studying and why I want to start the youth hostel when I’ve completed my degree.

The story contained within the pages is a real one and sadly I know people who are like the characters in the book. This is a side of a few my people here in The Bronx that shames my mother and pisses me off to no end. It’s a class of people who perpetuate the stereotype of thug Puerto Ricans and sadly it’s a side that too many non-Latinos judge mi gente (my people) by. My parents protected me from this type of life but it still managed to creep into my world via friends and relatives. My neighborhood is a short bus ride away from the ‘hood in the book but it might as well be a different country when you compare my ‘hood to the one in the book.

The author Adrian Nicole Blanc was a free lance writer hanging around court rooms when she came across the case of Boy George. At first Le Blanc was interested in doing a story on him and then she met his girl friend Jessica and the book was born. She spent ten years getting to know her characters and writing about them. Theirs is the true story of Puerto Rican teenagers growing up amid poverty, drug addiction, violence, and sexual abuse in the Bronx. The characters that made me want to yell at them are Jessica, a seductive sixteen-year-old in 1985, when the book opens; her younger brother, Cesar, by age twelve already "busy sprinting around the warm-up track of a criminal life"; and Coco, Cesar's lover since they were both fourteen and the mother of two of his children. Jessica's Cinderella romance with Boy George, a free-spending heroin dealer whose business grosses more than $500,000 a week, wins her a seven-year prison term on drug charges. Soon thereafter Cesar begins serving nine years to life for manslaughter. Boy George is sentenced at the age of twenty-three to life without parole. Coco is left struggling to raise her five children, to relate to their four fathers, and to negotiate with schools and social-service agencies. Preview some of Random Family courtesy of amazon.com



Posted by @ 1:53 AM
1 comment from:  Aisha,