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carmyn 's review for:
Black and White
by Paul Volponi
Volponi's book came recommended by other English teachers as a book that students liked. I felt it was decent, but it didn't blow me away. In fact, I was more than a little annoyed by both protagonists and felt that their crime was so unjustified that I felt little sympathy for their predicaments. The book is written in alternating first person narrative.
In the story, "Black and White" are the nicknames of the two main characters, Marcus and Eddie. They've been friends for all of high school, inseparable on and off the basketball court despite racial tensions that seem to loom close to the surface in their school and community. Their nicknames relate to their respective races. Neither boy has the same economic means as some of their fellow teammates and when the entire team decides they need a certain expensive shoe rather than get a job at McDonald's (which both boys seem to believe is "beneath them," after all they ARE the stars of the basketball team), they decide to rob people at gun point in broad daylight. What a surprise when they get caught! Sheesh. The level of stupidity is a bit amazing to me.
What follows is a breakdown of who gets blamed and how each boy handles the situation, how it affects their friendship, how it affects their future prospects. Their struggle even spills over into other problems in the school that reflect back to an ugly incident a few years earlier when a student was killed at a basketball game.
I guess if students are interested in any of these topics this may be a book to recommend. In our book club, several students expressed a distaste for the ending and found much of the book rather ridiculous. However, we'd just read Sherman Alexie's "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian" and this book suffered by comparison.
In the story, "Black and White" are the nicknames of the two main characters, Marcus and Eddie. They've been friends for all of high school, inseparable on and off the basketball court despite racial tensions that seem to loom close to the surface in their school and community. Their nicknames relate to their respective races. Neither boy has the same economic means as some of their fellow teammates and when the entire team decides they need a certain expensive shoe rather than get a job at McDonald's (which both boys seem to believe is "beneath them," after all they ARE the stars of the basketball team), they decide to rob people at gun point in broad daylight. What a surprise when they get caught! Sheesh. The level of stupidity is a bit amazing to me.
What follows is a breakdown of who gets blamed and how each boy handles the situation, how it affects their friendship, how it affects their future prospects. Their struggle even spills over into other problems in the school that reflect back to an ugly incident a few years earlier when a student was killed at a basketball game.
I guess if students are interested in any of these topics this may be a book to recommend. In our book club, several students expressed a distaste for the ending and found much of the book rather ridiculous. However, we'd just read Sherman Alexie's "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian" and this book suffered by comparison.