Curtis, Christopher Paul. Bucking the Sarge

One can draw the parallels between this and The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green quite easily; it's about a boy trapped in a dead-end life with an essentially abusive parent, in a specific, clearly-drawn segment of society. In this case, it's Luther Farrell, whose mother is a slum lord, loan shark, and corrupt operator of a group home for men in Flint, Michigan. He's bright, works his heart out for the science fair, but his mother already has hit future planned out for him.

So, much of this book is full of despair. But it has cleverness, too, an interesting narrative voice, and more resolution and possibility of victory at the end than I ever would have expected.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's a non-linear book, but it's so full of flashbacks that you tend to lose any sense of stable time, and wonder whether a given scene is taking place in the present or in a flashback.

It's a picture of desperation and resilience--people doing what they have to do to stay alive, to stay on top of things, no matter what it takes. It draws a world in which nothing is simple, everything is tangled together, and it's hard to see any way out. Which makes me wonder if the ending isn't just a little too simplistic--though I hope it isn't, because though he may be fictional, I like Luther and hope that things work out for him.

It's a pretty good book. It's got some humor in it, and it's sad without being hopeless, and I think it gives people some insight into the lives of people living on the bottom rungs of society with sleazy lawyers and payday loans. I didn't quite love it, but I'll give it credit for being good at what it was trying to do--and I was intensely fond of the ending, it must be said.

Curtis, Christopher Paul. Bucking the Sarge. New York: Random House, 2004.