Muchacho

Johnson, L. (2009). Muchacho. New York: Alfed J. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-375-86117-8

Why read this book

Teetering on the edge between making it and not making it? Suspecting that you could do better but not sure you want to risk trying? Read how Eddie Corazon decides to change his fate from the dubious to the hopeful in Muchacho.

Plot summary

Eddie Corazon is an alienated teenager in small-town New Mexico. He’s maneuvered himself into the alternative high school where things are a little more flexible than the regular high school, but he hasn’t given up on his education completely and he’s keeping himself out of trouble with the law, even if his dad is always pissed at him. When he decides to follow a teacher’s advice and take a dancing class, he meets Lupe, who is too good to be true. She’s smart, self-confident, and pretty, and for Eddie it’s love at first sight and time to clean up his act to be worthy of her attention.

Critical evaluation

LouAnne Johnson develops two themes in this novel to suggest how a young person can choose to do better in life. One theme involves the power of love and the other involves the power of books. Eddie’s relationship with Lupe is an obvious force for good in his life. Lupe is remarkably mature and Eddie picks up on it right away. She has her priorities figured out and she understands emotional intimacy, as when she tells Eddie why she isn’t the jealous type:

I’m not jealous because I’m really smart and I’m not bad-looking and I really really really care about you … I’m a wonderful girlfriend to you. And if you didn’t appreciate me enough to be faithful, then you would be too stupid to have for a boyfriend (p. 165).

Eddie realizes he’s onto something good having Lupe as his girlfriend and he figures out how to be the kind of guy she’ll stay with.

Johnson is equally explicit about the power of books to change Eddie’s life. Eddie calls himself a secret reader and talks about books that have led him to think differently, including an unspecified short story by Sherman Alexie, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Miguel Riuz’s The Four Agreements. Eddie’s poem that ends Muchacho also salutes books:

If you don't like your life
You can open a book and follow the words to some new place ...

Or if you don't like your life
You could create your own book
And follow your own words to some new place
Where you write yourself a new life ... (p. 196)

Muchacho’s fast-paced and cleverly written first-person narration adds a lot of spirit to the novel. But I frequently found myself questioning the authenticity of this voice, especially when Eddie takes off on a political spiel. Taken altogether, his political observations become a litany of progressive political analyses that, in the voice of a teenager in small-town New Mexico, stretched my credibility. Similarly, Lupe’s maturity seemed more ideal than realistic, despite the suggestion that the loss of her mother in a car wreck had led to wisdom beyond her years. But perhaps this points toward a legitimate distinction between adult fiction and young-adult fiction. Perhaps younger readers are a little more willing to value the ideal over the real, and perhaps it’s more important for an author of young-adult fiction to explicitly model good choices for teen readers than to aim for completely authentic narration.

Setting the story in a Mexican-American community raises similar issues. Ethnicity is not as unimportant to Muchacho as it is to Alex Sanchez’s young-adult novels, but neither does it play the central role that it occupies in Matt de la Peña’s Mexican WhiteBoy. There’s a lot of Mexican-American context to Eddie’s story, but the novel could have worked about the same if the protagonist had been an alienated white youth. The benefit of the Mexican-American context is that Mexican-American young adults may be more likely to read the story and benefit from it. But not if they find the ethnic features inauthentic, which is something I can’t judge as well as they will.

About the author

LouAnne Johnson grew up in rural northwestern Pennsylvania and served in the U.S. military (both the Navy and the Marines) for nine years before becoming a teacher of reluctant high school students. Her 1992 memoir My Posse Don’t Do Homework was made into the 1996 film Dangerous Minds. Her work as both a teacher and a writer focuses on how to make education work better for students who have been poorly served by the traditional system (Johnson, L., n.d.).

Genre: Latino, Coming of age

Curriculum ties

Johnson provides an excellent student reading guide on her web site. Her guide is not so much about following the plot or understanding the themes of Muchacho as it is a guide to reading and journal writing in general. Teachers could employ her strategies to address the needs of reluctant readers while students are reading Muchacho or other fiction and non-fiction.

Book-talking ideas

• Play the YouTube video of LouAnne Johnson channeling Eddie.

• Tie in the book with Becoming Eduardo, a movie based on the book. Becoming Eduardo was completed this year but apparently not yet released (Becoming Eduardo, n.d.).

Reading level/interest age

The engaging narrative, the level of the vocabulary, and the topics addressed in Muchacho make it appropriate for younger teens as well as older teens.

Challenge issues

There is no sex in Muchacho (Lupe’s focus on becoming a doctor leads her to draw the line short of where Eddie would like to go), no explicit violence, and no profanity. Eddie articulates a thoroughly liberal view of education and life in New Mexico that conservatives might consider propaganda if the book were required reading in a public school course.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Direct the challenger to the positive reviews in School Library Journal, (September, 2009, Vol. 55 Issue 9, p. 162) and Booklist (August 1, 2009, Vol. 105, Issue 22, p. 58).

Why I chose to read this book

The local high school librarians’ young-adult reading group chose Muchacho for its monthly selection.

References

Becoming Eduardo. (2009, October 11). The Internet Movie Database. Retrieved November 21, 2009, from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1273198/

Haddon, M. (2002). The curious incident of the dog in the night-time. New York: Doubleday.

Johnson, L. (n.d.). Biography. LouAnne Johnson. Retrieved November 21, 2009, from http://www.louannejohnson.com/bio.htm

Ruiz, N. (1997). The four agreements: A practical guide to personal freedom. San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen Publishers.