Las Cucarachas

(Paperback)

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Description

Life hits rock bottom for 12 year-old Peter Kim when his family's apartment gets burgled and he loses his most prized possession, an Apple computer which he bought with money saved from two years of doing the world's crummiest paper round. Undaunted, Peter tries his best to forget and move on, but, taunted by his friends and spurred on by the desire to shut them up, he reluctantly sets out to find the persom who robbed him. As his search gathers steam, he becomes increasingly convinced of the burglar's identity.

Reviews

"With respect to Yongsoo Park's rollercoaster of a second novel, something should definitely be said about Holden Caulfield. Something like: 'Peter Kim is a modern-day, Korean-American Holden Caulfield, ' or even, 'Las Cucarachas is The Catcher in the Rye for the '80s, with significantly fewer white people.' That will really tell you what Las Cucarachas is like. That said, from the first page, Park's tough-guy-with-a-soft-center narrator Peter Kim deftly sucks you into a sweaty, adolescent world filled with Atari, The A-Team, and The Last American Virgin all splashed up against the racially jumbled backdrop of 1980s New York City."
--T Cooper, author of Some of the Parts

Author Bio

Yongsoo Park is a novelist, filmmaker and playwright. His debut novel BOY GENIUS was recognized as a Notable Title for the 2002 Kiriyama Book Prize and as a finalist for the 2003 Asian American Literary Awards. A former Van Lier Fellowship winner at the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Park was born in South Korea and now lives in Harlem with his wife.