Muddied by unconvincing characters and careless prose, this follow-up to Rodriguez's American Book Award–winning debut novel, Spidertown, struggles to find a new way to once again chronicle the life of Puerto Rican teenagers searching for identity in the South Bronx. Jose and his best friend, Dinky, the son of an imprisoned drug dealer, are high school classmates who surreptitiously publish The Buddha Book, an underground comic book that tells true tales—"real story, real names, real scenes"—about their life in the Bronx. After Jose murders his ex, who's left him for a drug kingpin named Angel, he is plagued with guilt and looks for a way to confess. The boys decide to tell all in a final issue of their comic book. But before they do, Rodriguez introduces a host of characters with flashy, pseudo-tragic personas—including Jose's stepsister, Anita, a stripper and Angel-groupie with a penchant for killing her lovers—who inhabit a dismal world of chaos and disorder. It's obviously a world Rodriguez knows well, as he was born, raised and continues to live in the South Bronx. But this time, his hurried and repetitive narrative fails to convey his characters' motives and despair in a meaningful way. The comic book device is similarly underworked. Rodriguez avoids revealing much about the comics' content or impact, reporting merely that the last issue "arrived with a splash." What we get instead are aimless depictions of teenage liaisons, where the girls are more sex-starved than the boys who indulge them, and too many shoddy metaphors such as "Dinky's eyes jumped around the half-dark, like he had gotten a good burst of energy from somewhere." (Aug.)
Forecast: This disappointing sophomore effort will soon migrate to remainder tables, though the comic-book jacket should attract a few browsers.
