Reviews for American knees

The average rating for American knees based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-07-19 00:00:00 Michael Goebel Raymond Ding is 40, divorced, and, as a boyfriend, sort of lecture-y and condescending. He works as the Assistant Director of Minority Affairs at Jack London College in Oakland and, in his relationship with Aurora Crane, a younger Eurasian woman, he can't seem to forget that he's the guy she's sleeping with and not her Ethnic Studies professor. Interminable conversations about the sexual politics of race and the racial politics of sex abound, and eventually Aurora asks him to move out. Raymond has the typical mid-life crisis but only because he feels it's expected of him, has another relationship, helps his dad come to terms with aging, figures a few things out, and does a lot of growing up. But I never really liked Raymond enough to care about any of it. The book itself is often very funny, especially in Raymond's conversations with his dad or his friend Jimmy. It is also frequently sexually explicit -- which as an Asian person I appreciated since it shows we don't spend all our spare time doing math problems -- but which as a reader, I found sometimes unnecessary if not awkward. Wong is a good writer and I'd like to read some of his other work, but I didn't love this one.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-03 00:00:00 Jason Garcia I read this book for asian-am Lit in college. It was a good course with a great instructor who is also an author. He happened to be friends with Shawn and brought him to class one day. After all of the history and more "serious" six novels that we had to read, this one was much lighter. Shawn told us that he wrote this book basically for his sister(s)(?) who wanted a sexy beach book.