Truancy by Isamu Fukui

"It has nothing to do with intelligence," Zyid said sharply. "Some people are not meant for school. All kids are branded as a single faceless mass and herded through school like cattle. Some of them may be as smart as you want, and yet still recoil at their freedom and dignity being stolen from them by the Educators. The Educators will make them beg and sweat for an abstract grade just as a dog might perform tricks for a bone -- except that the dog might chew on the bone and taste something concrete while the student is left only with a bitter taste in his mouth."

Interestingly enough, this book got me thinking of John Taylor Gatto. Mr. Gatto was a teacher for 29 years before he became quite critical of 'The American Educational System'. One of his famous works, for example, is "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)." Another is "Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008)".

As it turns out, young Mr. Fukui has more or less come to many of the same conclusions as Mr. Gatto. But rather than write a non-fiction book, Isamu has taken these systematic complaints, fictionalized them, and for our entertainment taken them a little further along the evolutionary path; so that what you find in Isamu's fictionalized "City" is an education system that's been fine tuned to develop just the sort of 'citizens' that don't have the energy or conviction to do any heavy thinking. Instead they listen to the authorities and are easily controlled. Students in particular are kept in a state of utter demoralization, while their parents are kept so busy at work that the "family unit" scarcely continues to exist.

The 'official' description follows:

In an alternate world, in a nameless totalitarian city, the autocratic Mayor rules the school system with an iron fist. Fighting against the Mayor and his repressive Educators is a group of former students called the Truancy, whose goal is to take down the system by any means possible—at any cost.

Fifteen-year-old Tack is just trying to survive. His days are filled with sadistic teachers, unrelenting schoolwork, and indifferent parents. Things start to look up when he meets Umasi, a mysterious boy who becomes Tack’s mentor.

Then someone close to Tack gets killed in the crossfire between the Educators and the Truants, and he swears vengeance. To achieve his purpose, he abandons his old life and joins the Truancy, looking for an opportunity to confront Zyid, its enigmatic leader. But Tack soon finds himself torn between his desire for revenge and his growing sympathy for the Truants…

My Thoughts:

I found TRUANCY to be thoughtful and interesting, and sometimes just plain funny; as when Isamu takes a punch at current events by having the Mayor's staff invent the deadly disease-of-the-week which is fed to The Media every time the Mayor has some problem he wants to hide from the populace.

The plotting was very good, and the story unfolds in layers as Tact finds himself first opposing The TRUANCY and then joining it. And I really enjoyed the secondary characters, like Tact's mentor, a boy with almost super-human martial arts abilities.

There's been some criticism of the violence in this book, and the abilities that the teens demonstrate. No less that the Library School Journal stumbles when it writes that "[T]he characters are amazingly skilled in a wide variety of unbelievable ways. Described as "kids" or "children," they are nonetheless portrayed as expert assassins, brilliant tacticians, even world-weary bartenders".

To which I can only say that the reviewer failed to understand the genre that this book falls into. When reading Truancy you need to realize that it is incorporating graphic novel-like elements.

Think old Kurosawa movies like "Seven Samurai", Clint Eastwood spagetti westerns, Kill Bill, or perhaps "Ghost in the Shell" or "Vampire Hunter D" and you'll have the right 'voice' in your head to appreciate Truancy.


All-in-all I found TRUANCY to be a fun read. It's not perfect --I thought it was too long-- but it's thought provoking and entertaining. I plan on picking up the prequel sometime later this summer. If you're uncertain try Amazon's look inside.

Considerations: Violence, language

Pam
Somewhere in the X-burbs

Truancy

Accelerated Reading level : 7.0

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Tor Teen; 1 edition (February 2, 2010)
• ISBN-10: 0765322587
• Take-a-Peek

Truancy is the brainchild of student, Isamu Fukui. At the time he wrote this book is was only 15.

Here is an NPR interview with him.

A more in-depth article can be found at Children's Literature