Reviews

Petty Crimes by Gary Soto

nrphoto's review

4.0

My wife and I frequently read short story collections to each other at night. She is a junior high English teacher and also writes young adult fiction, and as such she reads a lot of material written for adolescents. This is one of those books. It's 10 stories of 10 children growing up in urban Hispanic American culture. Most of them are poor, all of them dealing with something traumatic. A bully, street gangs, an aging grandfather, a missing rooster. Some of these stories are so funny I nearly wet my pants laughing. Others are quite real and morose, while still others are tender. In each of them, Soto manages to really find the voice of young adolescence. It is easy to see he is writing from his roots, and he is very in-tune with the feelings and experience and awkwardness that is young adulthood. I'm often amazed at how really good writers of young adult fiction are often more poignant and profound than most writers of adult fiction who use five times as many words. We read one story a night and skipped a few nights, so it took us about two weeks, but you could plow through this book in an hour, and what a delightful hour it would be.