Concrete Candy: Stories

by Apollo

Overview

Six incendiary stories that reflect the rage and frustration -- and the determination to survive -- of America's disenfranchised inner-city youth

Concrete Candy marks the debut of an astonishing new writer -- notable both for the authenticity and immediacy of his voice and for his age: fifteen. Three years ago, Apollo, a child of the inner city and a protege of the acclaimed novelist Jess Mowry, began writing stories that reflect the tension, drama, and pathos of the urban reality he has lived and witnessed. The result is this collection of six powerful, haunting tales of boys dangerously adrift in the 'hood.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307755797
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/12/2010
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	2 MB

Editorial Reviews

Apollo is a vibrant new writer whose righteous tales of urban youth grip us with their honesty and power. Concrete Candy should be read by everyone concerned with understanding the struggles and humanity of young men in our inner cities.

Robert Allen

Immediate, compelling and powerfull. Apollo's work commands and deserves attention.

Jess Mowry

Despite the international fascination with hip hop culture, few have written about it from the inside. Not only as 15-year old Apollo given us the goods, he has produced some first-rate prose as well. By the time he's twenty, he'll put us all out of business.

Ishmael Reed

Six stories on life in the black ghetto, written by a 15-year-old boy from California. They range from Trash Talk, on drugs and violence, to Four Wolves and a Panther, on a white boy who would like to be black.
Synopsis copyright Fiction Digest

Fiction Digest

A first collection depicting life in the black ghetto of Oakland, California, by a pseudonymous author who began writing it three years ago, when only 12 years old.

Oakland novelist Jess Mowry, who has acted as "Apollo's" mentor, shepherded into book form the six vivid stories that comprise this auspicious, if awkward, debut. The stories, all dealing with the disillusionments and dangers of growing up black in the inner city, are essentially thin and unvaryingly predictable and sentimental. "Four Wolves and a Panther" tells of a lonely white kid, ignored by his family, who yearns to be black—and culminates in a "surprise" ending that won't surprise anybody. "Jungle Game" grafts an unbelievable plot onto a dreamy boy's willed identification with a black panther (a recurring image) abused by its keeper at the city zoo. Other pieces are similarly marred by hyperbole, though Apollo produces some gritty dramatic effects in two tales of teenagers lured into drug-related violence: "Trash Walks" and (especially) "Bad Boyz," the latter of which hums with a surrealistic intensity that's briefly reminiscent of Richard Wright. Is there talent here? Absolutely—in Apollo's ability to move a story swiftly toward its conclusion, in sharp observations of his neighborhoods' blighted lunar landscapes, and in his precocious and obviously genuine obsession with important social issues and tensions. But his people aren't real yet: All his male protagonists are either grossly overweight or sleekly, gracefully muscular; his women are either nagging mothers or docile girlfriends; his white characters, with a single exception, racist imbeciles. This isn't what life is like; it's what life seems like to a sensitive preadolescent.

Mowry was surely right to encourage Apollo to write fiction—and Gloria Naylor was as surely wrong to include his work in her Best Short Stories by Black Writers. What this promising young writer needs now is, simply, more practice writing; less premature praise; and more stringent editing.

Kirkus Reviews

"Apollo is a vibrant new writer whose righteous tales of urban youth grip us with their honesty and power. Concrete Candy should be read by everyone concerned with understanding the struggles and humanity of young men in our inner cities."

— Robert L. Allen, Ph.D., senior editor, The Black Scholar, and coeditor of Brotherman: The Odyssey Of Black Men In America

"Despite the international fascination with hip-hop culture, few have written about it from the inside. Not only has fifteen-year-old Apollo given us the goods, he has produced some first-rate prose as well. By the time he's twenty he'll put us all out of business."

— Ishmael Reed

"Apollo's characters are heir to a kind of cynicism only the ghetto can breed. Concrete Candy is an often startling view inside the mind of a talented fifteen-year-old writer grappling with questions of race, identity, and social justice in his young world, a world all too soon scarred by American nihilism." — Cheo Tyehimba, coauthor of The Ghetto Solution

From the Publisher