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Title: I would give the first 1/3 four stars if I could...
Review: "The Skin I'm In" is fabulous, but I don't think this lives up to it at all. The first third of Bang! is an excellent evocation of a family and a neighborhood in decline.After that, the book itself declines into unbelievable, author-directed silliness. Even if everything that happens to Mann after his father abandons him in the country is taken at face value, I find it impossible to believe that for a whole month no family member and no person in authority thought to look for the boy at the stable where he loved to go daily. A stable that became convienently empty just in time for him to move into it.And to call the child Mann when the whole book is about rites of passage into manhood is just ludicrous. The final scenes of supposed redemption between Mann and his father are some of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes I have even read in fiction of any type.The many messages of the novel are worthy, but the novel itself is quite flawed.
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