Dec 05 2008
Oscar Hijuelos: “This is the kind of book I wish I’d read…”
“This is the kind of book I wish I’d read when I was a teen,” Oscar Hijuelos is quoted as saying on the back jacket flap of Dark Dude, his young adult novel set in the unlikely dual landscapes of Harlem and rural Wisconsin. It’s the story of Rico, a Cuban American teen who is struggling to find a place in his family, his neighborhood, and in his own skin. His fair hair and skin keeps him from fitting with the latino crowd, and his sensitive demeanor makes it tough for him to negotiate the halls of the tough urban high school he avoids attending. Rico decides to run away to Wisconsin to join a surrogate older brother who escaped there with lottery winnings to go to college, and tries to unravel his feelings about family and the future, while adjusting to life in a setting about as far from Harlem as a city kid could get.
Dark Dude is actually the kind of book I read when I was a teenager, just the sort of thing I sought out in authors like Paul Zindel, Norma Klein, S.E. Hinton, and others. I always gravitated toward realistic portrayals of teens who I imagined were “just like me”–but not. Same stuff I like now. I actually went back and read a number of those books not too long ago, and they’re still pretty good, albeit somewhat dated. I don’t know who the contemporary equivalents to those authors are, but certainly teens are fortunate to have Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Hijuelos among them.
