Ryan Gattis

An ambitious attempt to cover gang life in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots in 1992, told from multiple first person perspectives. Like other reviewers, I was hooked by the first chapter, engaging instantly with Mexican cook Ernesto and shocked by his vicious murder, but just couldn't connect with the rest of the characters, from Ernesto's hard bitten teenage sister Lupe to a fireman caught up in the violence.

Gattis tries for authenticity with Hispanic dialect and slang terms, overexplaining for white readers who have never watched a TV show or read another novel depicting street kids, yet fails to create a second sympathetic personality after Ernesto is killed. I got the theme - everyone is 'involved', both in gangs and in the lives and deaths of others - and the novel certainly generates a vivid portrait of six lawless days in Los Angeles, but I need more than action and violence, sorry. Also the little teenage 'homies' were faintly ridiculous, with their 'street names' like Clever and Trouble - hey, guess the coded origin behind those monikers, if you can! - and obsession with 'respect'. Ernesto's death in the first chapter is in retaliation for the accidental shooting of another gang member's sister, and then Ernesto's death is 'avenged' by his sister, kicking off an epic gangland battle of tit for tat - who or what is supposed to deserve respect in a group of high school dropouts with more bullets than brain cells? Nurse Gloria, who has to bribe private mortuary workers to come and pick up Ernesto's body from the gutter, and the fireman who watches his friend take a brick to the face are about the only sane voices in the story ('Excuse me if I never stopped to consider the motive of fucking gangbangers because I’m too busy dropping hose and ducking a chucked rock the size of a softball.')

My other issue is with the first person narration - writing convincingly in one 'voice' is hard enough and Gattis has about fifteen different characters on the go, but either the narratives sounded the same or didn't match the characters who were supposed to be speaking. The dialect and slang slipped in and out depending on how much exposition the author was trying to fit into a chapter, and gang members were either explaining simple Spanish terms or waxing lyrical on the history of Los Angeles, breaking the literary fourth wall with the author's research. One character delivering a personal view interspersed with regular old third person would have worked better for me.

Despite the 1990s timeline, the subject is sadly still socially relevant - there's a line about a twenty year cycle of riots that is only a year or two out - but I just couldn't connect with any of the characters.… (more)