So so good! For all the marginalized kids, for all the disenfranchised kids, for all the punk kids - this is an ode to you! Thank you, James Spooner! ( )

Great art ( )

James Spooner offers up an interesting perspective on punk music and race, but the pacing is slow and the book is so overstuffed with minutia from a single year of his day-to-day teen life and his many crushes, friendships, and parental woes that I was ultimately bored by the time he got around to making a point.

I'm thinking about watching his Afro-Punk documentary though. ( )

very readable fictionalized (with composite characters) memoir starring a biracial skateboarding teen (Black bodybuilding dad, white mom) who moves back with his mom to small (mostly white) desert town of Apple Valley CA and starts getting into the punk scene, sometimes clashing with the white supremacist punk rock crowds. CW/TW: racism, fighting, drug abuse.

Story, art, and layout are all 🔥!!! I usually struggle with keeping names and faces straight (IRL and in media) but Spooner manages to make his characters easily identifiable in his black and white drawings, each with a distinct, dynamic personality and background. ( )

A memoir set in the California high desert and in New York City: Spooner writes about discovering punk rock music, making friends with other Black and biracial kids, and navigating relationships with white supremacists. Spooner lives with his white mom, who loves him but doesn't understand what he's going through; his dad, in NY, isn't an active parent, but does inadvertently facilitate his introduction to the punk scene around St. Mark's Place and Tomkins Square Park. Filled with musical references (Black Flag, the Descendents, Wasted Youth, Buzzcocks, Bad Brains, etc.).

The art is all in black and white, which initially made it difficult for me to keep all of the characters straight; I enjoyed the second half of the book (including the New York trip) more than the first.

Quotes

...if you don't get excited, you can't be disappointed. (31)

Rock 'n' roll is a Black American legacy. Punk rock is Black music. (89)

Internalized racism can be a temporary means of survival. (136)

We have always had to make choices around when we speak up and when we bite our tongues. (143)

Certain books and films have helped many of us to define who we are. Finding them is like finding ourselves. (187)

Punks have been pushing intersectional politics since the '80s, exemplified by the D.I.Y. venue Gilman Street's front door that reads "no racism, no sexism, no homophobia." Punk positioned me to listen. (226)

Ironically, Blackness has always shed light on how whiteness has been catastrophic. (260)

...when a person shuts down one emotion, the mind responds by shitting down all emotions. We don't get to pick and choose.
Stuffing years of anger deep inside hadn't given me space to process grief. (289) ( )