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Lädt ... King of Angels, A Novel About the Genesis of Identity and Beliefvon Perry Brass
Keine Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.   ) PerryBrass | Mar 21, 2013 |  Strangely I was thinking, wrongly, that this novel was more “abstract” about a boy and his search for spirituality, and instead there is a lot of earthly subject, like, but not only, sex. The setting is the Southern US of, I think, the ’60, Kennedy is president, so for sure it’s before 1964. One of the other points other than sex the young man in the novel is facing, is the racist culture of the south, a racism that is not only limited to black people, but also towards who is different in any way, from religion to sexuality. Benjy is a Jewish boy in a Catholic private school, and this will lead him to be isolated, and to make friends with the misfits of the school. The ’60, the south, the private Catholic school, all of them concur to make the setting very well done, probably born from personal experience, and therefore realistic and engaging. It’s strange since Benjy is only 13 years old, but I “heard” him like he was older; he is the narrative voice and he is not much older when the novel will end, still in high school, but what he lives, and what he feels, are usually to me of older boys. I had to think about it, and my conclusion is that, usually, if the author wants for his main character to have sex in a young adult novel, he makes the boy near 18 or even older. That is for a “publishing” point of view, kiddie sex is not well seen. But it’s actually wrong, we are all even too aware that underage sex happens, and unfortunately there are also abuses, especially in certain type of private school (I don’t want to enter in details or being political here, but that is often enough in the news). Letting Benjy being 13, having him facing sex and sexuality, made him even more realistic; true is that, in this way, this is not a Young Adult novel, not at all, this is a Coming of Age story for an adult target. Kings of Angels is a melting pot story, with three strong main plot, Benjy’s Coming of Age, which includes his questioning religion and sexuality; the mystery / thriller / murder plot developing inside the walls of Benjy’s private Catholic school; and Benjy’s relationship with his father, a strong relationship that of course will help Benjy become the man he is destined to be. This last plot was odd to find, since I’m used to have the male character dealing with a problematic relationship with the mother, especially in the South. It’s important to highlight all these thread since it means this is a multi-layered story that can appeal to different types of reader. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1892149141/?tag=elimyrevandra-20 elisa.rolle | Jul 11, 2012 | Zeige 2 von 2
 That would be enough to make King of Angels a good book. But lurking beneath this veneer, Brass uses his novel to ask a variety of questions about how children see the world for themselves and eventually how they make various choices—despite parents, despite teachers, despite society, despite religious teaching, and despite each other. That has been for decades how almost all LGBT kids grew up in America, and I applaud Brass for making his Benjy such a little mensch. King of Angels is a sobering, truthful, yet subversive text and Perry Brass’ most accomplished work. “Brass' rich descriptions verge on poetic, they remain specific to emotions and action . . . [this] allegory, albeit written in an almost flat syntax, deftly portrays the voice of an awkward teenage narrator. A pivotal tragedy in King of Angels serves as symbolic, surprising and inevitable.” “King of Angels might be compared to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, substituting the turbulent 1960s with Lee’s depression-era setting and replacing Catholic-Jewish antagonism and homophobia for the race relations that drive To Kill a Mockingbird . . . By making the narrator of King of Angels a slightly older gay boy, Brass introduces a twist to the Southern coming of age story.”
King of Angels is the coming-of-age story of Benjamin Rothberg, a 12-year-old master of "shape-shifting," of changing identities while steadfastly grasping the unique features of his own. The child of a marriage between a handsome Northern Jewish father and a classic-WASP-beauty Southern mother, Benjamin must change identities from Jewish to none-Jewish, from being a smart, precocious self-aware kid to masquerading and "passing" as a "regular guy" boy, from growing into a sexually curious (and possibly gay) young man to experiencing a fragile adolescent innocence, almost in love with a pretty girl. Set in Savannah, Georgia, during the tumultuous Kennedy years, King of Angels explores the role of Southern Jews in the still-segregated South, the explosive race relations and racial consciousness of this era, and the emergence of a genuine gay community with its own honest, outsider viewpoint. It is also a realistic story of the underground world of boys who must fool their parents and each other in order to achieve any form of unguarded closeness. As a "half-Jew" attending Holy Nativity, a Catholic military school in Savannah, Benjy also becomes aware of many forms of seduction and attraction: the seductions of a secret sexual life in the school, the seductions of his own heart taken with a handsome Puerto Rican male student, and the attractions of the Spirit in all of its revealed forms. This is a novel about the genesis of identity and belief itself, in a questioning heart and questioning time, while growing up in the changing South in the early 1960s. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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