Spidertown

by Abraham Rodriguez Jr.

Book Overview

En las calles del sur del Bronx, Miguel es uno de los selectos. Tiene un Impala '68 con interior color cereza, todo el sexo que quiera de cualquier mujer que desee, y siete mil d lares guardados en su... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140238387
• ISBN13: 9780140238389
• Release Date: September 1994
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Great Book but somewhat confusing

An amazing book. Gets a lil confusing at times but all is made clear. The story has many twists and turns and ends in a suprise that is amazingly simple. Very intense.

Our stories, told with dignity, at last ...

During Spidertown's first printing I read it and was so moved I passed the book along, it found its way from Co-Op City to Fordham, from Harlem to Queens ... and it may have been the first and last time that those friends of mine, some of them no longer with us, saw their lives potrayed in print with the honesty and pride that they deserve ... Abraham Rodriguez Jr. gave them something precious ... the knowledge that our stories are worth telling ... worth reading .... I never did get that original copy back, it's nice to know the book has been reprinted ... it's nice to know Rodriguez' genius has been recognized ... it's nice to have our stories told with such dignity ... finally ...

This story tells the true feelings of most of our younster.

I enjoyed this book. I can really relate to this book because for every character in the story i had a face to match it. I was even one of those characters. This book really touch me in the sincerety in the feelings of these characters. This book can not be anymore realistic than it is. Mr. Rodriquez out did himself in depicting the lives in these urban areas and I thank him for it. I finally read something that was exactly how i see things now and back when i was 16 1/2 years old.

A Great Novel

I discovered Abraham Rodriguez when I read a great short story of his in the equally great anthology, "Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings." After I read that short story, I knew I had to read more of this amazing stylist. "Spidertown" was an amazing novel. It would make an amazing movie. Read it!

There's always hope in a desperate situation

16 year-old Miguel want's out of the live-fast-die-young drug trade that permeates the South Bronx. The glimmer of hope that arrives,allowing him to even consider leaving his cracklord mentor and friend Spider, is a young beauty named Cristalena. The novel is fast-paced and Abraham Rodriguez,Jr. lets you feel Miguel's frustration and pain, as he has some very adult decisions to make. Often you forget that he is only a teen who's only worries should be getting up early for school the next morning...not whether he'll survive a drive-by shooting, or get "iced" by his fellow compatriots in the drug trade. As a white reader of this novel, I didn't think I'd be able to relate to the Latino characters in the story. But as a college sophomore, I relate to Amelia, the college student-turned-crackhead-turned college student, who knows the only way out of the streets of the South Bronx is by getting off of them and getting an education. You feel the frustration, desperation, and hopelessness that all these characters feel. Even the dealers and pimps themselves admit that they know this is the only hand they have been alloted to play in life, and therefore, since this is all they know, dealing drugs is all they will do. The violence will go on, no matter how senseless we all feel it is. Rodriguez attacks white people as being the cause of the South Bronx's state of chaos. He is right, although I would go farther by blaming the U.S. government, which essentially are supposed to be the "people" anyway. Unfortunately, the wealthy are the only ones who ever really benefit from any type of government. But even in the South Bronx, and other cities like it across America, young people as well as old, hold onto hope as the last miracle for survival against what must seem to them, a pre-ordained situation of hopelessness. Miguel and the other young people who must eke out a living in a place where parents don't want them, school is pointless, and a job at McDonald's are for chumps, are the voice of a generation that aren't crying or whining, but work with what they have, simply in order to live another day.