Isamu Fukui

I found TRUANCY to be thoughtful and interesting, and sometimes just plain funny-- as when Isamu takes a punch at current events by having the Mayor's staff invent the deadly disease-of-the-week which is fed to The Media every time the Mayor has some problem he wants to hide from the populace.

The plotting was good, and the story unfolds in layers as Tact finds himself first opposing The TRUANCY and then joining it. And I really enjoyed the secondary characters, like Tact's mentor, a boy with show more almost super-human martial arts abilities.

There's been some criticism of the violence in this book, but most of that comes from people who couldn't finish it. I think perhaps they might have stumbled over the 7th grade vocabulary and had to stop reading. (The accelerated reading number is generic "7" by the way. One of the highest levels I've run across in years of doing reviews.) In the end, it's quite clear that the message is anti-violent.

All-in-all I found TRUANCY to be a fun read. It's not perfect --I thought it was too long-- but it's thought provoking and entertaining. I plan on picking up the prequel sometime later this summer. If you're uncertain try Amazon's look inside.

Oh yeah, one other bit of advice. This book isn't entirely grounded in 'reality' with a big "R". When reading TRUANCY you might want to put on your "Seventh Samurai hat", your Clint Eastwood spagetti western hat, and think of the book more as a graphic-novel without the graphics.

Considerations: Violence, language

pam t~
mom and reviewer
(booksforkids-reviews) show less

Roger Waters wrote in the classic Pink Floyd song Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 the now famous lyrics:

We don’t need no education.
We don’t need no thought control.

Isamu Fukui seemingly agrees with these sentiments in his latest novel Truancy Origins, a book that stokes rebellion in the educational system, frees minds, and makes certain students aren’t just another brick in the wall. Or at least, it believes itself rebellious. But like most teenage rebellion, it’s a bit show more unconvincing. More posturing than substance. A remake of Rebel Without a Cause with Muppets playing the lead parts.

Still the book’s guaranteed to appeal to its intended audience, disinterested, rebellious teenagers. And the straight-A students who want to be disinterested, rebellious teenagers. Some kids don’t want to go to school—some even hate school—viewing it as some kind of exquisite torture devised by adults to punish them. (So close to the truth.) Going to school can appear to be a waste of time and inefficacious. Good for the social event, but not much else. An authoritarian system run by power-hungry fools, centered more on statistics than students. And these impressions are right. The educational system is broken—at the very worse needing a complete overhaul. It needs to be closely monitored and not followed blindly. Because when schools fail to educate, they’ve failed in their primary responsibility. And many schools fail to educate. The real question is who deserves the blame for this problem.

Twin brothers Zen and Umasi have grown up privileged. Silver spoons and Nintendo Wiis aplenty. Adopted by the Mayor of the City—a sort of neo-fascist educator—when they were six months old, Zen and Umasi have conflicting views on school. Umasi values education and gets good grades. Zen—incredibly smart but bored—despises the time he spends in school and acts out. Soon the brothers uncover the truth about the City’s educational system. A truth that shatters their world, causing them both to run away from home.

For Zen, the injustices within the City’s educational system are horrible. Evil, in fact. An evil that must be violently overthrown. Malcolm X style. And he strives to accomplish this, gathering an army of Truants to battle the City’s law enforcement. While Umasi harbors many of the same attitudes as his brother, violence is not his answer. It is not any kind of answer. So he stands against his brother. Against his twin. Vowing to stop Zen before it’s too late.

Truancy Origins is a book trying to be many things. There are the exciting action-oriented set pieces as the two brothers battle against each other, often described in highly visual, cinematic detail. These fights are well-done and engaging, and Fukui displays a real flair in writing them. The fights themselves resemble science-fu, the bastard love-child of science fiction and kung fu popularized by The Matrix.

And then there’s the other part of the book which strives to be a social commentary on education. Fukui really misses his opportunity to say something substantive in these moments. And the book suffers because of this. His exploration of the ills of the educational system is shallow. He identifies the problems, but is not as convincing with the answers, often substituting fortune-cookie mysticism for real wisdom. Think Caine in Kung Fu. The author’s young age—Fukui’s eighteen—and the intended young adult audience needs to be taken into account. Still by writing about social issues, Fukui is expected to have a certain depth and quality to his arguments, a maturity of thought. This is lacking, which is disappointing since the opportunity for a tremendous social statement is there. Fukui just misses it.

Zen and Umasi are both great characters, each possessing a real charisma. Umasi’s character arc throughout the novel, though, is less believable. His transformation from book nerd to uber-badass seems forced. Most of the minor characters are plot devices, their presence in the narrative only furthering other aspects of the story. The chief antagonist of the novel, Rothenberg, is one-dimensional to the point of caricature, only motivated by his extreme hatred of children. He’s over-the-top evil, displaying absolutely no redeeming qualities. No gray area, nothing of interest.

The dialogue is occasionally awkward and stilted. I couldn’t imagine teenagers speaking like this. Unless they watched a lot of BBC. It was too proper, less like spoken word and more like written word conversations. Like reading Middlemarch. But with kung-fu.

Last Word:
As a high-octane-kung-fu-science-fiction-multi-hyphenated-action extravaganza, Truancy Origins works. Really well. It’s only when the novel veers into the realm of social activism does it suffer, struggling to say something both substantive and relevant. Still Truancy Origins should resonate with its young adult audience, with its snarky, rebellious attitude towards authority and education. Like literary wish fulfillment for wanna-be rebels. A middle finger to the man. Graffiti on the Wall. show less

Judging this book solely based on the fact that it was written by a 15 year old boy, it's quite good. Comparing it to other YA literature, it's mediocre at best. The plot is mediocre, the characters waiver between being flat and three dimensional, and Fukui relies far too heavily on violence. That being said, he's an engaging enough writing that I wanted to know what happened, even though I found the end disappointing. I can definitely see Fukui's potential and hope that he continues to show more write. Because if he allows his writing to grow up as well, I think we'd be in for a treat. show less

"I think it's a good concept - a totalitarian dystopia where school is the ultimate tool to control and mold the citizens of the city. [...]

However, I don't really think we got a good look at the functioning of this dystopia. There's maybe only two or three chapters where the characters exist within the system, and then we start to break out of it. [...]

[...]

[...] It's just fight scene after fight scene, with some talking and thin plot development in between, which leads into the next fight show more scene. And the fights usually involve a lot of kicking, where people give "powerful kicks" or are kicked "forcefully." There's not a lot of variety in the language, and even when it's not word-for-word repetitive, it still feels that way. The vocabulary is fine, but the overall structure still needs a lot of work.

The dialogue is also just as stilted. When the characters talk it feels very unnatural, very stiff and formal, even when it's between peers. [...]

The most formal and awkward of all the characters in the book are the leader of the Truancy, Zyid, and the protagonist's mentor, Umasi. They're both incredibly intelligent with strong wills, and they're both extraordinary (bordering on superhuman) fighters. Both are almost unreal, which really detracts from the basic helplessness that the main character, Tack, should be feeling.

It should be noted that Zyid wears a windbreaker "pinned around his neck like a cape" and well, that's what it looks like Fukui is wearing in his author photo. And uh, "Umasi" is "Isamu" spelled backwards. Projecting much? Did I really just spend two days of my life reading a Mary Sue? Why didn't I throw this book against the wall? It's certainly heavy enough to make a loud thump. Did it need to be 400 pages? Did the story warrant 400 pages?

It's basically a cheesy Hong Kong film shoved into the framework of teenage rebellion against government and system. Which I point out, is a very popular theme recently. [...]

[...] Fukui wrote Truancy when he was 15, and now it's been published when he's 17. So that probably means that only a year or so passed between it getting picked up, which really isn't a lot of time for him to grow as a writer. I feel like he should have put it aside and come back to it years later, to polish and refine it into something more sophisticated. He says in the jacket copy that it's important for him to be in school to write about it, and that's a point, but in writing the novel he already had the basic ideas down, the feel of school. That part was fine. It was the actual execution that needed work, and that kind of thing is something you learn with time."

(Read the full review.) show less