This book is laugh out loud funny at many points, even when you know you shouldn’t be laughing. It has elements that are so far fetched, yet its main themes ring true. It is social commentary at heart, dressed in the most comic style. A novel about a black guy who surfs, was homeschooled by his suicide councilor/black power preaching/psychology professor dad alone (“my father said he never panicked when someone from the neighborhood tried to hang themselves, because, “for the life of them, black people can’t tie knots for shit.””), owns a farm in the middle of Los Angeles (“so I chose to specialize in the plant life that had the most cultural relevance to me- watermelon and weed.”), loves Kafka and quoting Latin (“semper fi, semper funky”), rides a horse around town, has a bus driving girlfriend who is married to a gangster rapper turned sitcom actor, and gets stuck owning a slave who used to be a child actor on the “Little Rascals” (“sometimes work consisted of donning a shiny pair of emerald green and pink silks, holding a gas lamp at arm’s length, and posing in my front yard as a life-size lawn jockey”) is not the most true to life plot scenario. The story holds together loosely, but the book is mainly a racial commentary dressed in joke after joke. It worked as a novel only because the pace of jokes was funny enough to sustain the action. The plot was ridiculous, but it never took itself too seriously, until the concluding twenty pages or so when it tried to wrap up with something to say. It makes one think of how far race relations have come in America and how far they still have to go. “Regardless of your income level, the old adage of having to be twice as good as the white man, half as good as the Chinese guy, and four times as good as the last Negro the supervisor hired before you still holds true.”
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