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    Dark Dude
    Dark Dude
    Dark Dude
    Ebook311 pages4 hours

    Dark Dude

    By Oscar Hijuelos

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Oscar Hijuelos comes a riveting young adult novel set in the late 1960s about a haunting choice and an unforgettable journey of identity, misidentity, and all that we take with us when we run away.

    He didn’t say good-bye. He didn’t leave a phone number. And he didn’t plan on coming back—ever.

    Fifteen-year-old Rico Fuentes has had enough of life in Harlem, where his fair complexion—inherited from an Irish grandfather—keeps him caught between two cultures without belonging to either. He pours his outsider feelings into a comic book Dark Dude, with his friend Jimmy illustrating. But when Gilberto, who’s always looked out for Rico, moves to Wisconsin and Jimmy loses himself to an insidious habit, Rico decides enough is enough.

    With Jimmy in tow, Rico runs away to the Midwest in search of Gilberto. The heavily white community feels worlds away from Harlem, and for the first time, Rico sees what it’s like to blend in—no longer the “dark dude” or the punching bag for the whole neighborhood. But the less energy Rico needs to put into proving he’s Latino, the less he feels like one. And the more he gets to know the people around him, the more it’s clear that a change in location doesn’t change human nature—and that there’s no such thing as a perfect community.

    Faced with the truth that there are things that can’t be cut loose or forgotten, things that keep him from ever having an ordinary white kid’s life, Rico must decide whether he can make a home in the place he ran to…or the one he ran from.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtheneum Books for Young Readers
    Release dateMar 12, 2009
    ISBN9781416994756
    Dark Dude
    Author

    Oscar Hijuelos

    Oscar Hijuelos (1951–2013) was a first-generation Cuban American and the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He wrote several novels, including Dark Dude and A Simple Habana Melody. 

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    Reviews for Dark Dude

    3.5/5

    48 ratings10 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Narrated by Armando Duran. Rico is of Cuban descent but appears white which leads to a lot of problems in his New York City neighborhood. Tired of the negativity of his home, school and city life, he and buddy Jimmy hitchhike to Wisconsin to live with Gilberto. Wisconsin is a world away from New York City, but Rico enjoys the mellow and friendly Midwestern culture. The change of atmosphere also gives him time to figure out who he is and the life direction he should take. Rico is an earnest geek, almost too straight arrow to be believed given that he grew up in New York. Narrator Duran interprets in a gee-whiz tone that underlines Rico's earnestness. Lib notes: plenty of recreational alcohol and drug use, some raw language, racist dialog and feelings, and a couple of scenes of physical violence.
    • 4/5
      Interesting commentary on what it's like to be a white looking Cuban American amongst darker skinner Latinos and African Americans in the NYC of the late 1960's. Rico decides to leave it all behind and hoof it out to Wisconsin. What he finds there reminds him of the old saying "there's no place like home."
    • 3/5
      Audio book performed by Armando Duran
      3.5***

      This is a young-adult novel from the Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

      Rico Fuentes is a “dark dude” – which means that he is a very-light-skinned Cubano – living in New York City’s Spanish Harlem. Blond, with hazel eyes and freckles, his appearance gets a lot of attention from the tough guys in the neighborhood, who hassle him for being a “whitey.” The fact that he’s slight of build, and prefers books and music to hanging in the streets doesn’t help. Feeling like he doesn’t belong, tired of getting beat up just for his appearance, and torn by events in his family and neighborhood, Rico decides he cannot continue. With his best friend Jimmy, he runs away to Wisconsin, where a former neighborhood boy is now attending college. Gilberto takes the boys in without question. Rico figures he’ll fit in here; he looks like everyone else in Wisconsin. But the 16-year-old soon discovers that he feels just as “different” in Wisconsin as he did in Harlem.

      There are elements of this book that I really liked. I enjoyed Rico’s journey of self-discovery and watching him mature and absorb life’s lessons. I liked the fact that he was fairly strong in character – refusing to get involved in drugs or crime. Rico is intelligent, thoughtful, loyal, curious, diligent and conscientious. I was particularly happy to see how his love of reading – especially the works of Mark Twain – helped him understand his situation and consider his options. What I didn’t like was the casual way in which these teens treated alcohol – they were constantly drinking beer. I wondered why Gilberto, who was portrayed originally as a straight-arrow and a role model, tolerated (and even encouraged?) his roommate’s constant use of marijuana. Bad decisions did not seem to have negative consequences; a couple of times I thought “Oh, this is going to turn out badly,” but the expected turn of events never occurred. I know that real life doesn’t always work that way; people behave badly and get away with it every day. But this is a YA novel, and I think the author needs to show consequences for his intended audience. I also wondered why Hijuelos was so circumspect about the time period. If he specifically mentioned that this is set in the mid-1960s I missed that. I figured it out fairly easily due to the cultural references, but I lived those years. I wonder if the teens which are the target audience for this novel will pick up on the time frame so easily. In all, I loved Rico, but I only liked the book.

      Armando Duran does a good job of performing the audio book. He has good pacing and good Spanish pronunciation. His skill as a voice artist also made each character sufficiently distinct to avoid confusion.
    • 3/5
      This coming-of-age story for young adults by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is, like Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, semi-autobiographical.Rico Fuentes is a fifteen-year-old Cubano with blonde hair, hazel eyes, and freckles, thanks to an Irish great-grandfather, and so he straddles two cultures in his impoverished New York City community. The Latinos don’t want him because he looks Irish, but the Irish hate “spics” so he doesn’t belong with them either. He is constantly forced to deal with negative reactions to his situation:"Like every time I walked into a bodega in another neighborhood and some Latino kids would give me the evil whammy with their eyes, like I had no business being there. Or I’d be in a department store with my Moms, going through the discount bins, and folks would look us over, as if wondering what that Cuban lady was doing with the white kid, like she was some kind of maid watching over me. And forget about all the times I’d go down into the Harlem park to play softball: I always brought along ‘get-jumped’ money ‘cause I attracted both Latino and black takeoff artists who saw my white skin as a kind of flashing neon sign that said ‘Rob me.’ I got jumped so often that I wished I could wear a mask, like a superhero, so that I wouldn’t get hassled.’”Rico may not be able to wear a mask himself, but he creates a superhero comic figure, “The Dark Dude” who can change races as needed, and convinces a talented Puerto Rican friend, Jimmy, to draw the characters for him. But ultimately comics can’t help with reality. When Rico’s protector, Gilberto, leaves for Wisconsin, and Jimmy gets hooked on heroin, Rico decides to runaway to live with Gilberto, and he takes Jimmy with him. Now Rico is in solid white country in a different universe than New York, one in which people say “gosh” and “golly” and grow crops and wear overalls. Rico thinks he has found heaven, but discovers that people are actually pretty much alike wherever you go, and he must make a choice about what his place is in the world, and in particular, which identity will make him feel the best about himself.Evaluation: The problem of having a divided cultural identity is a natural for the creation of a good story in the hands of a talented writer. Rico isn’t impressively analytical about his feelings or his social dilemma, but I think it was more realistic of Hijuelos to draw him that way than as having the insight associated with more maturity and education. I liked the story, however, and found it gave me much to think about.
    • 4/5
      Rico, the main character of Oscar Hijuelos’ Dark Dude straddles two cultures—Latino and American. As a light-skinned Cubano living in Harlem, he is hassled by his friends, school mates, and neighbors for his freckles because he is the “palest cubano who ever existed on the planet” (p. 10). Rico and his family live in a dark, “fourth floor walk up” that has bars on the windows to keep out burglars (p. 13). But the tenements in his neighborhood “had character—like pillars and sometimes stone-carved angels and starts decorating the stoop” (p. 66). To add to this setting, Rico’s new high school is a breeding den of drugs, sex, and violence. Rico gets so fed up that he starts to skip school and finds himself in trouble with the truant officers. With the prospect of going to military school in Florida, Rico cuts out of town with Jimmy to Wisconsin to live with his friend Gilberto.Rico leaves Harlem hoping to escape his troubles in Harlem. When he first arrived in Wisconsin, Rico felt that he was in a “truly different place, all pretty and peaceful” (p. 163). In Wisconsin, his pale skin and blond hair help him blend in. His room at the farm was different than in Harlem. His window no longer was barred and “just looking out that window made [him] feel that [he] was a million miles away from what used to bug” him in Harlem. Unfortunately, Rico couldn’t escape reality in Wisconsin. He still faced discrimination and was beat up by a group of white guys who just felt like messing with someone. Even before this terrible beating, Rico kept thinking about home, particularly his family. Slowly he was drawn home. It wasn’t easy for Rico to leave Wisconsin, his friends, and his relationships, but he knew that he belonged back in Harlem with his family. In many ways, Hijuelos’ message follows the old saying—home is where your heart is.
    • 3/5
      A freshman boy picked this up in the spring and LOVED it, told me I must read it this summer, so I did. He liked that it was so "straight up" which I thought meant the language was coarse. It is and it isn't. I think high school kids whose home lives are difficult will really get it, will really appreciate how Rico is in a position of raising himself in a way. His decision to leave a bad environment to give himself a chance and his hesitation to move forward with education to open his opportunities seemed very realistic to me. Overall, I thought it was good.
    • 5/5
      Rico lives with his family in New York. Even though he’s Cuban-American, his skin is so light he gets flack from others of his race. He tries to work things out, but his best friend Jimmy starts getting into heroin, his father is always drunk, and he starts to skip school. After Jimmy nearly burns himself to death while high, Rico decides they should run away to Wisconsin to live with a friend. They live on a farm with several other people, sharing the chores and enjoying the country life. But Rico learns that there will always be people who are prejudiced against him for a number of reasons, so he deals with it, grows up, and finds a way to live with himself, his heritage, and his New York family.
    • 1/5
      I could not finish this book. I kept getting jolted out of the narrative flow by the fact that the narrator, Rico, is a teen growing up in the 1960's in NYC's Spanish Harlem, but he uses current slang. In fact I thought I'd mis-read the review and that the story was set in the present, until another character made a passing reference to Vietnam. After two or three more anachronisms, I gave up. I didn't get very far.
    • 3/5
      I'm a big fan of Hijuelo's earlier novel (for adults) The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. This one didn't exactly disappoint but wasn't as rich. Light-skinned Rico Fuentes gets the sarcastic nickname "Dark Dude" in his tough 1960's New York neighborhood. Running away to join a friend in Wisconsin gives him a chance to grow and appreciate his Cuban American heritage and also to experience what we would now call a "hippie" commune.
    • 4/5
      Great read about the challenges and joys of growing up brown, even if you look white. Rico has to escape the city to figure out where he truly belongs.

    Book preview

    Dark Dude - Oscar Hijuelos

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