A Little Bit Langston

by Andrew Demcak

Overview

The Elusive Spark: Book One

Being different can be dangerous, and discovery can be deadly.

High school freshman James Kerr is finding out he’s not quite like his classmates. Around the time he realizes he’s attracted to his best friend, Paul Schmitz, James starts channeling a dead writer’s poetry and also discovers he has an ability to manipulate energy—a super power. Before James can figure out why this is happening to him, tragedy strikes in the form of Paul’s abusive father, and James is sent to a government-run school, The Paragon Academy, which specializes in juvenile paranormal research. There, he meets Lumen, the daughter of a famous Korean actress. Lumen's psychic ability might be the key to helping James understand both his poems and his own power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781634762748
Publisher:	Harmony Ink Press
Publication date:	12/03/2015
Series:	The Elusive Spark , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	204
Sales rank:	671,260
File size:	536 KB
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Andrew Demcak is an award-winning poet and novelist whose work has been widely published and anthologized both in print and online, and whose books have been featured by The American Library Association, The Lambda Literary Foundation, Verse Daily, The Best American Poetry blog, The Nervous Breakdown, and Poets/Artists. He has an MFA from St. Mary's College in Moraga, CA. He is currently an e-Resources Librarian for Oakland Public Library. He lives with his husband, Roland, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Editorial Reviews

2015-08-31
There's something to be said about an undiluted message. Demcak drops readers directly into the first-person perspective of James Kerr, a 14-year-old white gay boy with an undefined learning disability living in Los Angeles. Under last-minute pressure to finish an English class assignment, he writes a fully visualized poem thanks to the otherworldly hand of fictional Harlem Renaissance writer Montgomery Langston (whose equally fictional "An Undreamed Dream" is an appalling pastiche of "Harlem (Dream Deferred)"). When James does this again—and on the principal's desk while under a trance—James finds out that he has both a gift or two and a half sister, a teenage Korean girl named Lumen, thanks to shared extraterrestrial DNA contained at Paragon Academy, a "school" that is a front for the U.S. government. In all of this, James falls mutually in love with his only friend, Paul Schmitz, a 15-year-old mixed-race Filipino/white neighbor and fellow ninth-grader whose father tries to "toughen up" through weightlifting, controlling contact between James and Paul, and homophobia-based physical abuse. They even become genetically manipulated cousins while remaining lovers. This book really wants to take its place in the marginalized-will-lead-us genre, as popularized by The Matrix and the X-Men franchises. But when that positive message is delivered with acceptance of taboos and negative stereotypes—such as mixed-race people's "magical exoticism" and Magical Negroes using their supernatural powers to solely aid white protagonists—the message gets lost. Well intended but desperately unsuccessful. (Paranormal romance. 14-17)

Kirkus Reviews