Kung Fu High School
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Product Description
Wear your gear. Bring your blades. Back your family. Fight for your life. MLK High School has collapsed into Kung Fu High School–where Jen B. and her brother, Cue, belong to one of two gangs still standing against the puppet principal and the drug kingpin who pulls his strings. Cousin Jimmy–a world-champion martial arts master of mythic stature–arrives in town after swearing to his mother that he’ll never fight again. His rep precedes him and everyone’s itchin… More >>
Categories: Kung Fu books
Was it only a year ago that Ryan Gattis’ KUNG FU HIGH SCHOOL was published? It seems like eternity, for such was its impact on literature that nowadays I think of the world of writing as divided into two parts, BRG and ARG, before and after Ryan Gattis. Just as his predecessor, William Gaddis, launched his majestic THE RECOGNITIONS on an unsuspecting American public in 1955, the young Gattis, whoi had written only one book before, a limited edition not even published in his own country, hit the ground running telling the story of Jen B., a heroic teen in an American high school only slightly magnified from our own. Gangs rule the campus, and everyone gets “kicked in” as a matter of course by martial arts specialists, for in MLK High 95 per cent of the student body know some sort of ju jitsu or aikido or whatever.
The other five percent, Jen B. explains, are just super big and can get by on sheer size. Into this stressful environment her sexy cousin Jimmy Chang moves into town, and since he made a sacred vow to his mother never to fight again, he gets beat up royally and Jen’s brother Cue gets mixed up in the melee. In my town, people have worn out their copies of KUNG FU HIGH SCHOOL memorizing the big fight scenes, and at Burning Man earlier this month several “rival” associations of artists re-staged some of Gattis’ bloodiest, most organ-popping moments. It was like having Armageddon explode in your school locker.
Already a cult classic, KUNG FU HIGH SCHOOL will attain FIGHT CLUB status when the inevitable movie is made, or I don’t know, maybe by then people will have tired of the whole high school is a battlefield metaphor. My friends and I speculate if Ryan and his brother ever were actually street type kids, or were they the onlookers who see more of the game then the kids who OD in the boys room. Jen B . is sort of a sweet cross between Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Aniston, however, she is only fifteen and it is a little pervy of Ryan to get into her head so thoroughly, especially her unlikely crush on her light-brown eyed cousin Jimmy Chang. He is like Christ in two respects, his initials (sort of like Faulkner’s LIGHT IN AUGUST) and his willingness to sacrifice himself so that other kids could live a happy life.
Rating: 5 / 5
I visited a high school in New Jersey a few years ago. It was horrible. The once elegant stairways were now topped with chain link fence. The fence around the school yard was topped with razer wire. There were metal detectors at the entrances, just like getting on an airplane. How can you possibly learn in this environment?
This book takes this change in schools to one chillingly logical conclusion where the schools are truly battlegrounds.
Rating: 5 / 5
Awful doesn’t really begin to describe it, but I don’t care enough about this book to pull out my thesaurus and find a more accurate word, so “awful” will have to do.
Firstly, I went into this book with the mind frame that it was something of a piece of pulp fiction…something to be taken with a grain of salt. So I’d like to think that I did not have unrealistic expectations. That said, there is almost nothing about this book that wasn’t a let down. Let me tick them off:
The premise – This story takes place inside a school which has come to be called “Kung Fu High School” in which on any given day students will beat each other half to death (or sometimes fully to death). And the reader is supposed to believe that students will just keep going to school for this. The principal is some kind of deranged military vet who doesn’t mind letting the school become a killing ground that doubles as a drug runner’s conduit as long as he gets his cut.
The villain – is a twenty-something who is an incredulous blending of other stereotypes: he combines the ruthless cunning (and lying) of the TV show “Lost”‘s Benjamin Linus, the organizational prowess of your favorite corporate CEO, and the criminal aptitude of Tony Soprano. This motley collection makes him seem to be less of a human character and more like some kind of crudely combined chimera; almost as if the author started out with an idea of what he was supposed to be like and just added skills to him as the plot demanded.
The hero – is a half-Chinese 17 year old who just so happens to be 10 Bruce Lees all rolled into one. Oh, and he can apparently teleport. This kind of skill exaggeration and magical ability would have been fine except for the fact that this is whole story was written in a realistic light; so the hero just feels tremendously out of place in the story.
The prolific use of profanity – I am not sure whether this was just a symptom of the author’s lack of skill or his attempt to portray the thoughts and word choice of a 15 year old that grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. In my more generous moments I am willing to believe the latter but even this courtesy brings me to the next problem with the book.
The point of view – The author tries to write this story from the view of a 15 year old girl and fails MISERABLY. Not once in the story was I even remotely convinced that I was hearing a story read from the mouth of a female. I can give a token clap for trying something more difficult in story writing but I can’t pretend he succeeded. The closest he comes to his goal was in the brief moments when the narrator merely sounded more gender neutral.
The ending – I wont ruin it for those of you who don’t heed my warning and buy this piece of garbage anyway, but suffice it to say it sucks. It doesn’t just suck because I didn’t like the story’s outcome, it is entirely unsatisfying.
Don’t buy it.
Rating: 1 / 5
A “My Classmate The Barbarian”-esque (If your a connoisseur of HK movies, or a Nicholas Tse fan you’ll get that reference) like tale featuring a hard core girl with a bit of an incest problem.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is severely a good work of literature, read this classic story of a humble fighter who never fights and is forced into a battle he doesn’t want. Please go and buy this you wont be sorry.
Rating: 5 / 5