![]() He is looking back at his life and childhood. Yu is the narrator of the story and struggling with it. Constantine believes that he is a reincarnated samurai. Social services get involved and Benny moves in with Constantine, a man living in his building. When his grandmother passes away and his aunt is not available, Benny does his best to carry on by continuing to go to school, but he can only do so much. His mother passed away when he was younger, and he has been raised by his grandmother ever since. Twelve-year-old Benny was living with his ill grandmother in a Chinatown housing project. Thank you to the publisher Atria Books / Simon & Schuster for providing an advance reader copy via Edelweiss. This story took me by the reins and while it was a very quick read, I will remember Benny for some time. I was drawn into Benny's unfortunate circumstances, his survival instincts, and his culture. I seem to be an outlier (as usual), but I found this to be a very compelling read with vivid characters. It was easier to dress it up a little as fiction. The adult version of Benny was struggling to write a book (at the urging of his therapist) to work through his childhood traumas, but the honesty of what really happened wasn't always easy to commit to paper. This was the area of metafiction that was being employed. It became slightly confusing but I surmised that the character of Benny was looking back on his life and trying to work through all the crazy things that traumatized him as a kid. At a certain point the book propelled to a bit of flight of fantasy involving the concept of time travel. However, these were barely implied with no graphic detail whatsoever. In the past he's been a patient in the mental hospital, but is now navigating a bit of normalcy by working and living in a small apartment in the same building as Benny.īy reading some other reviews and from a brief warning in the preface to the book I was prepared for the foretold issues of child abuse and suicidal thoughts. His name is Constantine and he's a very fascinating character. ![]() And that's when he crosses paths with an unusual male neighbor who fancies himself a Samurai. He can only drag this out so far until Social Services gets involved. He tries to keep up appearances that all is well by continuing going to school, etc. His aunt is on tour and is practically unreachable. The real conflict occurs in the story when Benny's grandmother dies and he's left to his own devices. He had a rebellious aunt who toured in a punk rock band and couldn't help that much with the family. I also was interested in the life Benny experienced at school where he had a crush on the girl sitting in front of him in class, admiring her pony tail, but also getting picked on by some mean classmates. I particularly enjoyed hearing about the cultural foods being prepared in the kitchen. I loved reading about the simple and frugal life they shared together and the feisty nature of his grandmother. He lives with his aging grandmother in Chinatown because his mommy died years ago and he never knew his father because his parents had split up early on. The story is quite poignant and tracks the boyhood of Benny during the early 1980s. However, this book is a concise 224 pages, consists of the spare/straightforward Asian writing style I've come to enjoy.so with some trepidation decided to take the plunge. There were also potential triggers involving child abuse and suicidal ideation. Apparently, it's the concept of the narrator or character talking about the fiction as it's happening. When I investigated the details of this book- skimming several reviews- I was initially put off by some of the meager ratings and talk of something called "metafiction" which I knew nothing about. Times = ''.This offering crossed my radar via marketing email. So I ended up writing a script for spliting APE file by parsing the CUE file and converting the APE file to FLAC files separated by titles using ffmpeg: #!/usr/bin/env python2.7ĮncodingList = ('utf-8','euc-kr', 'shift-jis', 'cp936', 'big5') ![]() Normally ffmpeg would still convert the file completely while mac very likely throws an error during the processing. I found mac (which is the command that shntool used for decoding APE files) is way less tolerant than ffmpeg if the source file contains minor errors. $a_esc = array_map('escapeshellarg', $a_cmd) ![]()
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