Way Past Cool - Softcover

Mowry, Jess

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0998076740 ISBN 13: 9780998076744

Publisher: Anubis, 2016

Synopsis

Way Past Cool was the first -- perhaps the only -- novel of urban American black life in the early 1990's: the era of collapsed structures, lost dreams, dashed hopes, agonizing violence, and a level of rage that for white America is simply unfathomable. But, have things gotten any better? Way Past Cool is the story of 13-year-old boys who live alone in abandoned buildings, of 16-year-old single mothers, and of lives that make kids old by the time they graduate from junior high... if they live that long. This novel stars Gordon, who at the age of 13, leads his gang through the deadly streets of West Oakland, California. He carries a gun, has seen more people die than a Vietnam platoon leader, and can out-swear a dozen sailors. Gordon is backed by Lyon, a fragile-looking soft-spoken boy whose forays into mysticism have given him a spirituality that belies that fact that he'll blow your head off if he has to. Gordon's gang, known as The Friends, live in a state of tense coexistence with The Crew. The tenuous peace of their neighborhood is broken by Deek, a drug dealer whose bodyguard, Ty, is trying to protect his own little brother from the street life. Deek is trying to sell guns to each gang in hope of escalating their turf rivalry into real war... for his benefit. On the sidelines sit the police. The ones who aren't actually on the take are happy to let the kids kill each other off. Throughout this story of despair, violence, and hopelessness, runs a thread of human feeling and power that prevails even over the horrific reality of the characters' lives. The connection between the members of the gang is one of mutual survival, and of kids trying to meet each other's emotional needs without "proper parental guidance" or decent societal role-models. These young boys are violent, vulgar, and perceived by most of mainstream society as a lost cause, yet there is something uniquely human about them... all children are born knowing how to love, but must be taught how to hate. In a way that many "kinder and gentler" people will never understand, they love each other, and in each other they find hope.

About this title

About the Author:

Jess Mowry was born in 1960 and raised in Oakland. His first book of stories, Rats in the Trees, won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award in 1990. He lives in Oakland.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Black teen gangs in West Oakland are the subject of Mowry's first novel--a long cry of pain and rage over conditions in the ghetto. A fast-moving start (a bunch of kids on their way to school are sprayed with bullets from a passing van) is followed by a very slow-moving story about two early-teen gangs; 16-year-old drug- dealer Deek and his bodyguard Ty; and a teen mother, Markita, working at Burger King to support herself and her baby. Deek, who is evil incarnate, has hired the Big Boys in the van to give both gangs a good scare; the gangs, observing their ``rules,'' have a meet and decide that Deek must be killed. This duly happens, in a climactic firefight that lasts forever. A parallel storyline centers on Ty, a lost soul who regains his humanity when he stops his kid brother Danny from becoming another street-corner dealer and tries to stop Deek from murdering the Big Boys (``they knew too much''). Markita finds him sobbing in an alley and takes him home; they make love, and a schmaltzy ending suggests that they have a future together. Mowry uses this lumbering vehicle to make some familiar points: that his feral, gun-toting homeboys are still kids who do their homework and ache for love; that ghetto life is ``a long line of cages''; that ``black death means nothing to nobody''; and that the drug culture has devastated black pride and solidarity. Mowry (the story collection Rats in the Trees, 1990) does know the territory, but, given his overheated prose, his cry from the heart too often sounds like an out-of-control scream; for a restrained treatment of this material, there's always Boyz 'n the Hood (John Singleton's impressive 1991 movie debut). -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Anubis
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0998076740
• ISBN 13: 9780998076744
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 239