On his graduation day from Renfield High, Nick Park is determined to figure out if his heritage is the cause of his abysmal luck with girls.
Beginning the novel as an unreliable and unknowingly comic narrator, Nick Park struggles to fit into Renfield--an alarmingly homogeneous Connecticut suburb as he grapples with his own ambivalence towards his ethnicity and his neurotic love for girls. GIRLS FOR BREAKFAST is a uniquely funny, unforgettable meditation on love and race, family and friendship, acceptance and isolation.
Nick Park is an ironic, sharp-edged commentator on the world of masculine angst, relationships and sex, and his commentary brings to the mix an intelligent, candid and irreverent inquiry into what it means to be an "ethnic" teenage boy in the white suburbs of late twentieth century America.
From killing a hamster in 3rd grade in front of his entire class, to contracting illicit photos of his 8th grade crush, to repeatedly lying about being a 4th degree black belt, Nick Park is a character that you will remember long after you close this book.
The Author
David Yoo is a graduate from Skidmore College with an MA from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He lives in Massachusetts. GIRLS FOR BREAKFAST is his first novel.
Reviews of GIRLS FOR BREAKFAST
"As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Nick's humor is a cover for something darker. His self-absorption grows into intense alienation during his teenage years...Nick starts getting twisted up in the paradoxes of Asian American identity. Nick's behavior can be creepy, but his narrative is always bracingly honest..."Girls for Breakfast" recognizes that teenagerhood is so awkward, and takes itself so seriously, that it's instinctively funny. Parents like to tell despairing teenagers that someday they'll look back and laugh at their high school social disasters; this book might just prove it."
--Austin American Statesman
"This often hilarious first novel begins on the morning before narrator Nick Park's high school graduation, when he skips out on rehearsal to reflect on his frequently disastrous life growing up in the only Asian family in Renfield, Connecticut...Nick is a complicated character, and readers will alternately sympathize with him for his outsider status, and occasionally dislike him for his actions...[Readers] will find themselves laughing at many of his scrapes, and cheer when he marks the 'end of the selfish Nick' and begins to care less about what others think."
-Publishers Weekly
"Deeply funny and painfully realistic, David Yoo's novel does what Melvin Burgess's flashy DOING IT fell short of--gives readers the true inner life of an adolescent boy, warts and all. It isn't pretty, and it isn't at all comfortable, but man oh man, is it compulsively readable. A+++!"
--Reading Rants
"But though it's a blast from the past, there is also something heartwarmingly universal about Girls For Breakfast. A coming-of-age story reminiscent of Nick Hornby's About a Boy, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Sue Townshend's hilarious Adrian Mole diaries with a touch of David Sedaris, Girls... is the first book that I've ever reviewed (for Koream) that had me repeatedly bursting out with laughter in public. And in keeping with the novel's irreverent tone: I laughed so hard soda came out of my nose...Yoo limns the painful contours of ethnic self-hatred as the teenage Nick becomes older ... Girls... is a sheer delight, a hilarious novel from start to finish that has enough substance, sophistication and sarcasm to evoke howls of laughter from the average KA adult reader."
--Koream Journal
"Yoo's marvelous debut novel offers a painful, poignant look at the misery of adolescence as experienced by Nick Park, a Korean-American boy who is the only Asian in his upscale Connecticut school. His strict, aloof parents want a tennis pro and a straight A student; he just wants to be popular and goes through all sorts of hilarious, painful exertions (including pretending to be a kung fu master and teaching his classmates a bunch of made-up moves) to win their approval-to no avail...The payoff for Nick may arrive very late in the day-but readers will cheer as the blinders fall away and he has his epiphany on graduation day. Yoo's book is a revelation in its examination of the torture of middle school, of suburbia and what it's like to be different."
-The Buffalo News