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Avg. Rating: 4.5
Getting Real
This book is an amazingly accurate portrayal of what life is like as a teen in the US today. What makes this book so impressive is that it never shies away from the hard realities and underside of growing up in America: drugs, sex, violence, loss, adults who let you down, serious responsibility...you name it, this book confronts it. That's not to say these things are glorified--they are wrestled with, suffered through, examined and ultimately the novel culminates in...if not redemption, then at least hope.
Book aboutıat riskı teen is a sure thing
Trouble hunts some people down, while others seem to effortlessly avoid its camouflaged clutches. And still others charge headfirst into its clumsy, but firm grip.
Robert Lomos, the 16-year-old protagonist of Manuel Luis Martinez's latest offering, "Drift," wears his pain proudly all over his body. For him, trouble serves as his only reliable companion, besides his aged and ever working Grams.
Abandoned by his rambling father, a womanizing and party-hungry Tejano musician, circumstances forced Robert to quickly grow up and become the man of the house, caring for his innocent and perceptive little brother and his frail and mentally anguished mother.
But the stress from the daily challenges of a broken home quickly overwhelmed his mother and she, too, leaves Robert, taking his little brother with her to California where her overbearing sister wrapped her in a protective cocoon.
Written in the first person, the free-flowing, steam-of-consciousness-driven novel opens at Sunnydale Christian Academy in the barely fictionalized version of San Antonio where Robert lives now with his grandmother.
Sunnydale represents a last ditch effort by Grams to keep Robert, who has been kicked out of two school districts in just as many years, from becoming a "burro" like her.
Although the school is strict and even degrading - making the students raise a flag to go to the bathroom - Robert plays along so he can realize an abstract plan to follow his mother to the Promise Land of Orange County.
Although it has its share of bumps and dips, the narration develops much more smoothly than Robert's scheme, which seems inevitably doomed by the boy's own self-destructive notions. These notions pull and push the troubled youth, like a deceptively calm river, towards rocks, rapids, and a great, final fall, while his bruised and battered body drifts along for the ride.
Painful and frustrating, Robert's journey towards the verge of either oblivion or manhood and his swift plunge over the edge also compel the reader along with concealed currents.
These currents, however, spring from the reader's own history, a checkered past mixed up with a city that is simultaneously beautiful and dangerous, inviting and repulsive.
Robert shares this same confused, yet powerfully intimate relationship with San Antonio. The reader immediately empathizes with Robert, who makes references to the molinos, the "Edgewood School District," la matanza, the Alizondo Courts and the yerba buena of the West Side.
And while the educational system would be quick to label him as "at risk," we quickly realize he is no typical juvenile delinquent when he alludes to "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Catch 22," and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
His love of books and aversion to school, however, does place him squarely in a stereotype cornered by another literary character: Holden Caulfield from "Catcher in the Rye."
Although a strong comparison could be made between the two - both on a journey, both dropouts with strong ties to distant siblings - Robert is far more, well, likeable.
And while Holden's aversion to phonies seemed sometimes paranoid, Robert's demons are not so subtle. They scramble to meet him, beat him and kick out his four front teeth.
Still, Robert keeps getting up, and we root for the barrio boy each time, hoping he makes good, because when he stands up he stands for all the disregarded, misunderstood, underrepresented young men struggling on the West Side of our San Anto.
Sick of it all
DRIFT is the Robert Lomos' story as he travels through the journey that some of us refer to as "becoming a man." The product of a marriage that didn't last, Robert had to grow up when he should have been thinking of little kid stuff: carnivals instead of caring for his baby brother; Little League instead of worrying about his father's infidelity; homecoming instead of witnessing his mother's mental breakdown. Robert has sees his life take a downward spiral when his aunt takes his mother from San Antonio to Los Angeles, to aid her in her convalescence, and insists he stay behind.Robert lives with his Grams now at age seventeen, and his routine of partying hard, fighting, and cutting school has her at wit's end. So, she enrolls him in a private Christian school, where she believes he will be saved from the trouble that looms in his path. However, Robert ends up in even more scuffs and in even more bad situations than when he attended public school. Robert is tired of his ulcer causing him physical pain, and his mother and brother's absence causing him emotional pain. He decides to get a job, go to Los Angeles and try to convince them that he is now a man, a changed soul who is there to be their saving grace. Manuel Martinez has carefully constructed his protagonist's voice. A strong, resonant narrator, Robert's spirit breathes new life into the first-person format of the novel. You could see Robert as clearly as if he were standing next to you, hear his voice as if he were whispering in your ear, and feel the heartache he feels, as if it were your own tribulation. A commendable novel, DRIFT foreshadows of more great things to come from Martinez.
Reviewed by CandaceK
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers
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