Girls For Breakfast ::: David Yoo

"As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Nick's humor is a cover for something darker. His self-absorption grows into intense alienation during his teenage years...Nick starts getting twisted up in the paradoxes of Asian American identity. Nick's behavior can be creepy, but his narrative is always bracingly honest..."Girls for Breakfast" recognizes that teenagerhood is so awkward, and takes itself so seriously, that it's instinctively funny. Parents like to tell despairing teenagers that someday they'll look back and laugh at their high school social disasters; this book might just prove it."

Austin American Statesman

"This often hilarious first novel begins on the morning before narrator Nick Park's high school graduation, when he skips out on rehearsal to reflect on his frequently disastrous life growing up in the only Asian family in Renfield, Connecticut...Nick is a complicated character, and readers will alternately sympathize with him for his outsider status, and occasionally dislike him for his actions...[Readers] will find themselves laughing at many of his scrapes, and cheer when he marks the 'end of the selfish Nick' and begins to care less about what others think."

-Publishers Weekly

"But though it's a blast from the past, there is also something heartwarmingly universal about Girls For Breakfast. A coming-of-age story reminiscent of Nick Hornby's About a Boy, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Sue Townshend's hilarious Adrian Mole diaries with a touch of David Sedaris, Girls... is the first book that I've ever reviewed (for Koream) that had me repeatedly bursting out with laughter in public. And in keeping with the novel's irreverent tone: I laughed so hard soda came out of my nose...Yoo limns the painful contours of ethnic self-hatred as the teenage Nick becomes older ... Girls... is a sheer delight, a hilarious novel from start to finish that has enough substance, sophistication and sarcasm to evoke howls of laughter from the average KA adult reader."

"Yoo's marvelous debut novel offers a painful, poignant look at the misery of adolescence as experienced by Nick Park, a Korean-American boy who is the only Asian in his upscale Connecticut school. His strict, aloof parents want a tennis pro and a straight A student; he just wants to be popular and goes through all sorts of hilarious, painful exertions (including pretending to be a kung fu master and teaching his classmates a bunch of made-up moves) to win their approval-to no avail...The payoff for Nick may arrive very late in the day-but readers will cheer as the blinders fall away and he has his epiphany on graduation day. Yoo's book is a revelation in its examination of the torture of middle school, of suburbia and what it's like to be different."

"The raft of books exploring the issues confronting Asian-American youths are largely one-dimensional, preachy or politically correct to the point of castration. Maybe it's because this is David Yoo's first novel that he feels unconstrained by convention or cliche. Whatever the reason, he has produced a multi-faceted and subtly layered story in which the reader is as tantalizingly confused and irritated in turns as its teenage protagonist. Yoo's skill is to manipulate the readers' emotions and reactions to Nick in as intricate manner that reflects the complexity of the various changes he goes through. Like any teenager Nick has unbelievable highs and unbearable lows. You can take that journey with him and hope that Yoo provides a return ticket. It will be good value."

-The Asian Review of Books

"Deeply funny and painfully realistic, David Yoo's novel does what Melvin Burgess's flashy DOING IT fell short of--gives readers the true inner life of an adolescent boy, warts and all. It isn't pretty, and it isn't at all comfortable, but man oh man, is it compulsively readable. A+++!"

"I'd descended into social Siberia sometime during the first week of middle school and had no idea how I'd gotten there. This is, apparently, the question of my life." Nick Park, a Korean American, describes himself as "the only non-Anglo-Saxon student in suburban Connecticut," and blames his Korean looks for his lack of popularity and girlfriends. Readers, however, will understand that his problem is due to his desperate bids for attention. This edgy and wickedly hilarious tale, filled with references to '80s pop culture, begins on Nick's high school graduation day as he retraces his thoughts and experiences from elementary school to the present. Through Nick's perception of his mother (a woman who is more adept at cursing in Korean than cooking) to his perception of what makes the popular kids popular (hot girls, varsity letter jackets, and definitely NOT church), readers get to know a confused and lonely young man who is trying to know himself by any means necessary. Nick thinks a lot about girls, sex, and nude women; while the text is sometimes vulgar, it is actually quite true to the high school experience.

-School Library Journal

"Yoo doesn't pull any punches when he describes the adolescent agony of his main character, Nick Park, who resents being Korean-American in an all-white high school, and tries through various way --pretending to be a kung fu master, hiding his mom's ethnic dishes--to fit in."