No. Just no.

I'm slowly starting to admit to people that I read an embarrassing amount of YA books, but in my defense, most of them are labeled YA in the US whereas in the UK, they're just regular books. So I tell myself. But anyway.

REVIEW: The Painted Boy
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I've read Charles de Lint before, and honestly, I didn't enjoy The Blue Girl very much. I dunno, I just didn't gel with the characters, and more time was spent talking about how kickass/meek the characters were without really showing it. Maybe I just picked up on the fact that the auther was some old dude trying to write as a teenage girl. But whatever.

I was more interested in the this one, concept wise: Chinese kid, spirit animals, family clans- actually, the part that was most curious to me was the fact that the main character's Chinese. I was intensely interested on how that was gonna be handled, since it's not often I personally come across a story which explicitly stars some Asian character who's not being exploited for being Asian, if that makes sense (last time I read Amy Tan was in high school and I don't remember a damn thing about any of her books but I remember hating them all). There's been a good run of stories that have Asian characters as people on the side in which their Asian-ness is never called out (Looking for Alaska, shit, even Harry Potter). I like those; those are great. That being said, I think The Painted Boy does an okay job in not dropping some OOOOh ching chong ling long ting tong! Chinese mysticism stereotype thing to the point where I just wanna slap a bitch. Of course, there's the grandmother thing, and the glossed over training/rearing of the titular 'Painted Boy,' but since most of the book takes place in a different kind of decidedly non-Asian mystical setting of the South West, it's definitely a strange mash up. I guess +1 on the fact that not one character is white, so that's interesting.

Okay, straight up thought, I didn't finish the book. I couldn't- I just.. couldn't get through it. I rarely leave books, especially when I'm 3/4 of the way through, but I just had to put this one down. So a lot of my questions may have been answered at the end and and perhaps have made sense by then, but I doubt it.

First off, the characters: Just as flat and uninteresting as the previous de Lint book I've read. I was going crazy over the fact that I hated every single one of these characters within the first five pages. I swear. They are all so righteous, so goody-fucking-two shoes I almost stopped right there. And then when the bad guys showed up, they were so typically Latino gangster bad it was a stereotype in itself. And there was just to much telling- oh god, the telling! Every conversation came off like a tour guide of what life was like in that small town."The gangsters stopped there because that's where their turf ends. The other gangsters probably started chasing you because this is where their turf begins. You should get in a car and ride with us because these streets are unsafe with all the gangsters even though you could walk to our house." I swear to god, that's how the dialogue went. "Rosalie's nice. She's nice to everybody, picked up strays and would feed people off the street if she came across you. She's really loyal to her friends and even to the people who aren't. Her uncle will probably let you stay- he used to be a gangster too, but got out of it and runs this restaurant." Seriously. There was really no 'discovering' these characters/vessels to carry the plot at all.

The main character was some shell of a boy who, oh no, was ostracized throughout his life because of the giant tattoo on his back and his training that kept him from making friends in school- who somehow is perfectly socialized and makes friends and scores a place to live and a job in the first five minutes of arriving in a new town after getting chased across it because he was wearing a hoodie. He somehow makes a positive mark on everyone, despite his lack of personality and the fact that he doesn't do a damn thing. Just magically picks up languages (for no real reason) with his dragon powers. His first friend is a girl who's the nicest person ever and feeds him for free and takes in strays (like, literally has a pack of dogs that are former strays! How's that for showing?? HA HA) but has an intense hatred of gangsters. She's just SO NICE and so confident in herself. And so is her boyfriend- her boyfriend is so nice also! He's the perfect boyfriend for her and ends up being main character's guide/dude friend. Her best friend is the 'sassy' hot chick who the main character falls in love with in three sentences explaining how and why. 'Sassy' is in quotes because she's not actually sassy. She's just angry and goes on these five paragraph spoken essays about why she hates gangsters and is actually just a huge bitch. But it's okay, because she's hot. And they're in a band! They're all such self assured teenagers and they just know what's going on with everything- even adults can't scare them. Confidence? They got it. They got the same amount all around, it's like they're the same girl with slightly different levels of anger and niceness. There's more characters, but they're all about the same.

Maybe I'm just inherently bothered by books that italicize every non English word. Except 'loco.' Apparently that one is common enough for non Spanish people to understand. Maybe because when I read it, the italicized Spanish words automatically pronounce itself in my head in the voice of my former coworker/fake boss, who had this horrendous stereotypical, cringe worthy accent she slathered on to every non-English word. Whenever she said Latina, she even added a shoulder to shoulder boob shake. But I digress.

The story ends up taking on some strange mix of Native American mysticism along with Asian style dragons and kinda shoves them together to form some semblance of an idea. Basically, the back story of the dragons is that there are five spirit dragons that exist in one person each, that are supposed to be protectors of China I think. Maybe the world. And one of them is supposed to be for protecting the Emperor way back when (the most powerful one of course. Naturally, that's the one that lives in our robot of a main character). And then there's the general spirit animals that just exist, seemingly all in this one south west town (or maybe everywhere?) I dunno, but basically, at one point, all the dragons converge, and that's when you learn that they all live in the US. WHY? If they were just protecting the world, don't you think they'd be everywhere? And if they the dragons were from China, why don't they stay in fucking China? And with all of this spirit business going on and how the US apparently has their own spirit protectors, why do these non Native dragons got anything to do with this? The fuck kind of mash up is this? THIS DOESN'T MAKE SENSE. Is this supposed to be some tale about how we import everything from China? How the US has the monopoly on every 'powerful' thing that exists? I DON'T KNOW AND DON'T CARE ENOUGH TO FINISH THE BOOK.

I'd have to agree with one of the reviewers from Amazon: "The plot of this book sounds like it comes from some high channel Nickelodeon cartoon." I would say less on the cartoon, more on those tween live action shows they've been doing. Shudders all around.