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Show Them You’re Good: A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year before College
Maybe someday
43
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
18/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Jeff Hobbs
Publisher:
Scribner
Date:
August 18, 2020
Hobbs traces the academic pursuits of four Los Angeles high school boys with different backgrounds and resources who navigate challenges in class, race, expectations, cultural divides, and luck to attend college.
What The Reviewers Say
Drilling down into the second-largest school district in the country to shine an intimate light on a few senior boys in two very different high schools would have been a daunting task in less capable hands...Hobbs does it so well that these soon-to-be men may be forever cast in the amber of their adolescence: slightly familiar from the start and, finally, utterly unforgettable.
... intimate, empathetic.
Hobbs’s carefully observed journalistic account, written with the detached intimacy of ethnography and reported over a year and hundreds of hours spent watching and interviewing his subjects in class, at dances, sporting events, assemblies, homecomings, proms, graduations and in the students’ homes, helps flesh out this larger body of work with an empathetic but objective eye, and in so doing widens our view of the modern 'immigrant experience' to include that classic crucible: high school and college admissions, specifically, the experience of first-generation overachievers and the unique challenges they face in this regard.
With his fly-on-the-wall reporting style, life happens and the boys emerge fully themselves: driven, funny, sweet, wise, terrified, excited. A uniquely illuminating window onto the lives of young people in the midst of a hugely consequential year..
