"Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes, but when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.
Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court."
I don't think I could write a summary of this book if I tried, which is why I copied what's here from Goodreads. The book is a slow starter and I admit that for a while, I wasn't sure if I wanted to keep reading because I didn't feel like I was getting what the author was writing about (and generally feeling a bit out of my element). The book does pull together about halfway through, and once I had finished, I went back to the beginning and it all made more sense and came together. The sense of being out of my element never changed, but I felt like reading this story made me think, which is always a good thing. The author definitely puts a lot of elements in this book that make for good discussion, and while I don't think this is a book that everyone will love, it definitely makes for an interesting read (if you can get past the slow start).
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