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aydotjaydot 's review for:
Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir
by Eddie Huang
I am going back and forth on this book for a few reasons. First and foremost, how do you really rate a book about someone's life in their own words? This is the book Eddie Huang wrote about himself, his own experiences, and his own perspective on the world. It's an engaging read, likely because Huang is an engaging, charismatic person.
There are structural issues; some of this rests on the fact that the formatting of the ebook I borrowed from my library was... questionable and cut out several section breaks. But this book really felt like a hip hop song where the the artist writing the rap verse and the person writing the melody/bridge didn't actually collaborate that much and just kind of made the words fit. Huang is a gifted enough writer that I couldn't quite put my finger on what was bugging me about the book until I'd finished it.
That said, there's definitely a feeling of... lack of reflection? Other reviewers pointed out that a lot of the book feels like a long humble-brag with bits of shock value sprinkled through. They're not wrong, and while I would challenge that those bits are bad, I really get what they mean about it being sometimes hard to take. For as much as there are places where Huang absolutely owns up to shitty behavior (the Steak-n-Shake waitress situation), there are absolutely places where it definitely feels like that own up is more lip service than anything honestly felt (y'all let a family's pet rabbits out IN FLORIDA so they could be free because fuck rich white people? Like go off, but not when it comes to pets and the gator state.)
Still, it's not my business to judge Huang on his experiences and the stuff he did. He's a person. One who's really different from me, and one who absolutely deserves space to tell his story. He and I would never be friends, but it was cool to read about his life and perspective, and I'm curious to read his second book.
There are structural issues; some of this rests on the fact that the formatting of the ebook I borrowed from my library was... questionable and cut out several section breaks. But this book really felt like a hip hop song where the the artist writing the rap verse and the person writing the melody/bridge didn't actually collaborate that much and just kind of made the words fit. Huang is a gifted enough writer that I couldn't quite put my finger on what was bugging me about the book until I'd finished it.
That said, there's definitely a feeling of... lack of reflection? Other reviewers pointed out that a lot of the book feels like a long humble-brag with bits of shock value sprinkled through. They're not wrong, and while I would challenge that those bits are bad, I really get what they mean about it being sometimes hard to take. For as much as there are places where Huang absolutely owns up to shitty behavior (the Steak-n-Shake waitress situation), there are absolutely places where it definitely feels like that own up is more lip service than anything honestly felt (y'all let a family's pet rabbits out IN FLORIDA so they could be free because fuck rich white people? Like go off, but not when it comes to pets and the gator state.)
Still, it's not my business to judge Huang on his experiences and the stuff he did. He's a person. One who's really different from me, and one who absolutely deserves space to tell his story. He and I would never be friends, but it was cool to read about his life and perspective, and I'm curious to read his second book.