Author: Meg Medina
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!
Audio book read really poorly by Roxanne Hernandez.
If I'd known that this novel had won one of those sad-sack 'literary' awards I would never have picked it up in the first place, because such an award all but guarantees that the novel which carries it will be boring and irrelevant, but I didn't and it was. I thought that a book written by a Latina about the YA Hispanic experience might have something new or different to tell me than one written for the white community or for the black community, but you know what? Every one of them is really exactly the same, so what's the point?
I don't get audio book publisher's fascination with elevator music. Seriously? There's a ten second din of it at the start of the first disk, and this is a novel set deeply in Latin territory, so why not, if you absolutely must have music, have something with a Latin flavor? Is so-called Brilliance Audio so paradoxically dumb and unimaginative? For me, ditch the frigging Muzak.
Even that aside, I took a dislike to this novel right from disk one, but since it's very short, I figured I would try to follow it through to the end. I failed. It was that irritating and shallow. It's ironic, because the reason I picked this up in the first place was the title. I thought that was hilarious. How could a book with such an amazing title fail to deliver so comprehensively - and then win an award for its mediocrity?
It would have been hilarious if it were titled merely, "John Smith Wants to Kick Your Ass", but when the name Yaqui Delgado was added to the mix, it took it over the top and gave it a life of its own. Now I find myself wanting to read about Yaqui instead of about Piddy (no kidding, that was the main character's name).
I'd never never heard the name Yaqui before, and I live in Texas so most Latin names are unsurprising or particularly exotic to me. I'm not sure why a person would name their child Yaqui, which sounds like a description of someone who likes to yak a lot, but maybe that's why it was chosen. This focus on Piddy and not on Yaqui was another failure from my perspective.
I actually looked-up Yaqui on a half-dozen baby name websites and not a one of them - not even the one which offered exotic names, not even the Hispanic ones - featured it. How sad is that? I found it one one site which gave no definition of it, but merely referenced the Yaqui Indians of Río Yaqui valley in Sonora, in northern Mexico.
You can read about them in the wikipedia link I give on my blog, but even that doesn't have a thing to say about what the name means or whence it came. Pathetic, huh? So much for wikipedia. That just goes to emphasize how great of a name it was, but it simultaneously highlights how sadly this novel let down its title.
The problem with an audio version of a novel, as convenient as they are for listening to in the car on a daily commute, is that it's one more step removed from the author, and if the novel is already irritating, adding an annoying voice on top of that is hardly a charmed idea, especially if the voice doesn't sound remotely like it belongs to a high school student.
Roxanne Hernandez's voice performance (yes, no one reads these any more, they perform! Sheesh! ) was really wrong. She sounded way too old to be in school. Once I got past that, and started to focus on the story rather than the awful voice, I found that this novel is larded with Hispanic stereotyping (which is sad, given that the author is Hispanic), and high school YA tropes and clichés.
- New girl in school? Check.
- Main character approaching but not reached eighteen? Check.
- First person narration? Check.
- Bitchy girl bully? Check.
- stereotypical school jock? Check.
- Unrestricted School bullying? Check.
- Geek with eyeglasses? Check.
- Quirky best friend? Check.
Novels like this should come with a free prescription for Promethazine, as standard, they're so nauseating. So the deal is that Yaqui Delgado simply doesn't like the way way our main character sways her hips when she walks. Yep, that's all it is. That's her entire complaint She starts her harassment campaign by tossing a container of chocolate milk at the wall during lunch, showering our main character and her nerd friends with it, yet no one rats her out for her unacceptable behavior, and the people retained because of this vandalism are the victims. No attempt is made to ferret out the perps!
Seriously? what kind of sad-sack mentality is that? The only response to bullying and vandalism is zero tolerance, period. Yet according by YA novels, every single school in the US has exactly the same problems and nothing is ever done about any of them!. That's (not coincidentally) when I said, "Check please! I'm outta here!" Even this novel's warts have warts. No wonder it won a literary award.
