Daisies in the Junkyard
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From a priest who was in the trenches comes the heart-wrenching story of two kids on the mean streets of Chicago's South Side
South Chicago gives you lots of reasons to join a gang. Like, if you say no, they beat you up, follow your little sister home from school, and torch your house. Pretty soon, wearing your tattoo and colors, you learn what gangland means: Kill or be killed. Maybe both.
All Tony and Carlos want to do is leave the ghetto and go to college. But now the gangs have targeted them. Now, Tony and Carlos must take desperate measures to safeguard their futures and families from gangland's vengeance.
Richly textured, poignantly detailed, in a voice of raw authenticity, Daisies in the Junkyard is the story of the Mexican-American community struggling to maintain its culture and integrity against a backdrop of urban warfare.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Centering around the Tiananmen Square massacre and its aftermath, this remarkably structured and textured debut epic seeks to attach a face to the mysterious man who, by stepping in front of the rolling army tanks, became the most recognizable symbol of the massacres. Cheng succeeds in his endeavor, and in the process he gives China a face as well"one so vivid and provocative it's hard to walk away without a fresh impression of the massacre, the 13 years since, and modern-day China in general. Three months before the massacre, Xiao-Di returns to China after spending four years at Cornell University, where he fell in love with a blonde American girl who left him upon graduation. But he has tasted freedom and his return to China is turbulent. He cannot find work. He grapples with the way the masses adhere to tradition and respect authority. He lives with his grandparents (his parents are dead) and when not at home feeling angry and confused, he is out with his friend Wong, bleakly contemplating the future. Then, through the eyes of president Deng Xiaoping, we enter Tiananmen Square, where students have begun protesting. Cheng successfully humanizes the person he has called a complicated man, driven by a genuine passion to create a better society for the Chinese people. Xiao-Di soon finds himself impulsively partaking in a hunger strike and, before long, facing down a tank. Complicating matters is his brother, Lu, a Chinese soldier who is sent with a unit to find Xiao-Di. Through the brothers and their grandparents, a multifaceted and sophisticated portrait of the Chinese people is rendered. This is a rare find: historical and political without being pedantic, and briskly entertaining without being cheap, simplistic or contrived.
