Necessary Roughness

Unwillingly transplanted from inner-city Los Angeles to tiny, all-white Iron City, Minn., Chan walks a thin line between the traditional Korean values of his stern Abogee (father) and contemporary middle American mores. His parents, for example, deride sports (""In Korea,"" says Abogee, ""grown men would not waste their time fighting each other over a tiny ball""), but Chan becomes the kicker for the all-important high school football team. Lee, who has previously explored Korean American identity and small-town Minnesota settings in Finding My Voice and If It Hadn't Been for Yoon Jun, is less successful here. She fashions a number of subplots or incidents that are compelling on the surface-a racially motivated locker-room attack on Chan; a romance with a local girl; a tragedy involving Chan's twin sister; the road to the state football championships. But she compartmentalizes these developments: narrator Chan picks up and drops each concern before moving on to the next, with consequent damage to both the story's pacing and its credibility. In the matter of the locker-room attack, for example, it's hard to believe that the blindfolded Chan doesn't immediately guess who the chief culprit is; it's harder still to believe that two weeks go by before his attention returns to the attack. The choppy treatment is all the more disappointing given the many instances where Lee gets her characters' voices just right: they are proof that she can do better. Ages 12-up. (Nov.)