Debut • POC
Release date: October 12, 2010
Publisher: David Fickling Books
Source: My awesomely awesome buddy, Lauren
Category: Young Adult
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Synopsis: (back cover)
I’ve been picking up trash since I could crawl, and people always say ‘maybe one day you’ll find something special’. Then one day I did.
Raphel Fernandez is fourteen years old and part of the slum that barely makes a living on the mountains of the dumpsite. No education and no prospects: a lifetime of sifting through rubbish.
Then, out of the blue, he finds a key.
Keys open doors, and soon Raphael and his friends are just one step ahead of a desperate and dangerous police force. The three boys hold the key to a deadly secret. It leads to corruption, unimaginable wealth, and one man’s mission to put right a terrible wrong.
Why I Read It:
For some reason I had it in my head that Trash was a dystopian. It goes without saying (if you are familiar with my reading tastes), that I was immediately interested — so much so, in fact, that I included Trash as one of my “Most Anticipated 2010 YA Releases” for the second half of the year. Did it live up to my high expectations? Read on and find out…
What I Thought:
First of all, Trash is not a dystopian story. On the contrary, it is a very real, very current story that could take place in many areas throughout the world. While it wasn’t at all the story I thought I was going to get, Trash was absolutely amazing. It was a sad, happy, ugly, lovely book that messed with my emotions and stayed in my head for long after I read it.
The story begins at the dumpsite where one day the boys come across a bag filled with items they suspect are very important — especially once the police show up the next day offering a hefty sum for anyone who finds the bag and hands it over to them. But when they begin to investigate with the small clues left in the bag, it’s not long before they realize they have unwittingly been placed at the center of a political cover up that has been decades in the making. What Raphael, Gardo, and Rat thought was important turns out to be practically revolutionary and involves the most powerful politician in their country, Vice President Zapanta.
The interesting thing about Trash that you will notice right off the bat is that its setting isn’t fully divulged. I found myself hunting the text for any clue as to where the book actually took place. The most obvious clue to me (besides the dumpsite city, Behala) were the characters’ names; almost all of them were Spanish. But never, not once, does Andy name a country or use a landmark that would give a solid indication of where Trash takes place. That right there is part of Trash’s brilliance. Because slum life take place in more than one place in the world; it happens all over the world. So by not tying Trash down to one place, Andy allows the reader to imagine that Trash takes place in ALL the areas where people really live and work in slums full of trash. (More on my thoughts on the setting in the “FYI” section below.)
Another interesting aspect of Trash is its narrative format. The story is told in past tense by several characters and is acknowledged as the past by the characters. It’s a compilation of their personal accounts of the story that together make up the whole picture. Most of the story is told by Raphael with other portions told by Gardo and Rat (Raphael’s friends), and Sister Olivia and Father Juilliard (British missionaries). The multiple perspectives recounting their collective ordeal ratchets up the suspense and made me even more fascinated with what would happen next.
Trash is a true underdog story. At every turn the reader is made aware of the vast differences between the poorest, lowest class (which the boys belong to), and the rest of society. They are outcasts and easy scapegoats; people are ready and willing to criminalize them, making even travel on a bus difficult. I immediately began rooting for these marginalized children and felt very invested in what happened to them. And wow, do they have a journey to go through: there’s the unhealthy, rat-infested living conditions of the dumpsite and jail; interrogation and physical torment; police chases through the slums; dodging bullets and other weaponry; hunger and filth and danger that lurks everywhere. But while the boys have so much stacked against them, Andy also illuminates how incredibly smart and brave the boys are, creating a story in which the poor are ultimately triumphant, in ways big and small.
Trash reminds its readers how extreme the divide between the rich and poor can be without ever being preachy or obvious in its messages’ execution. It deals with political corruption and overwhelming greed and how they affect every layer of society. In a way, I felt like the name of the book and its dumpsite location symbolized how the poor are perceived and treated: they are the unwanted, easy to cast aside and forget about. But there’s a saying that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, right? So although people like Raphael and his friends are usually overlooked and underestimated, they are capable of much more than they’re given credit for.
And now, to discuss the ending. My immediate reaction was to feel completely happy and chalk it up as perfect for this book. But then I wondered…is it perhaps too perfect? Without giving anything away, I think readers will be torn over the ending; some will be content and others will rebel against the way it was portrayed. In the end, I decided that I was comfortable with it, although I don’t think everyone will be.
Okay, this is *slightly* spoilerific, but go ahead and highlight the section below if you’d like to read more on my opinion (stated as ambiguously as I could) of the ending…
I think Andy wrote it the way he did not because he honestly thought things would end up that way in real life but because he was writing a fictional story and he wanted to give the characters an ending that probably wouldn’t have happened if they were real people. The chance of it being a real-life ending would be, like, 1 in a bajillion, and Andy decided to write that 1 in a bajillion chance ending — kind of like a tribute ending for all the people out there who will never get the chance to live out this story in their own lives.
I’ll wrap up my thoughts with like this, my friends: Trash is beautiful little book whose pages breezed by but whose story lingers in my mind and heart. <3
Who Should Read It:
Anyone looking for a touching, thought-provoking book who doesn’t mind reading about the realities of slum life. Trash manages to have an uplifting, hopeful, inspirational message, but it also starkly illuminates the fact that as we’re sitting around enjoying this book, real people are living like trash just like the characters in this story. I think those who reads it will come away from it with a lot to think about the state of the world’s people and how lucky some of us are in comparison.
FYI:
It’s actually hard to find information on Andy…I don’t believe he even has his own website at this point. Here’s the short bio for Andy that Random House has on its website:
Andy Mulligan was brought up in South London. He worked as a theater director for ten years before travels in Asia prompted him to retrain as a teacher. He has taught English and drama in Britain, India, Brazil, and the Philippines. He now divides his time between London and Manila.
As I read Trash, I was reminded of the Philippines, Mexico and other Latin countries in the Americas, and India. To find out that Andy has resided in all of these places makes sense and confirms my guess that Trash was inspired by the people and way of life in the dumpsites in these countries.
Considering my ethnic background and the location of much of my family, Trash‘s similarities to the political history and current life of many Filipinos registered most strongly with me. The entire time I was reading Trash I was thinking about Smokey Mountain in the Philippines. (It’s terrible, though, to know that people are forced to live in slums all over the world, in many more areas than just the countries I’ve mentioned. To learn more about dumpsite slums, spend just five minutes on Google. Besides the countries I’ve already named, you’ll find mentions of Cairo, Tanzania, Brazil, Ethiopia, Guatemala…the list goes on and on.)
On another note, what do you think of the UK cover? I like it better than the U.S. one.
ONE MORE THING!!!
As I mentioned above, Lauren passed Trash on to me – and not only was she kind enough to send it to me, but she told me I could keep it. She also said that she liked it so much that she plans to purchase her own copy. Well guess what? Me, too. I have to own a finished copy of this book. So in keeping with the spirit in which it was received, I’d like follow Lauren’s lead and pass this incredible story on to someone else. If you are a blogger who really, truly wants to read Trash and you’d review it soon (like in the next few weeks), I’d be more than happy to mail this ARC to you. Anyone interested, please leave your name, blog URL, and email in the comments section. This isn’t really a “giveaway” and we’re going on the honor system with this one, so please only respond if you’re actually going to read and review it sometime before its October 12th release. Then if you’d like, you can keep this sharing thing going and pass it on to someone else… (:
Don’t Just Take My Word For It!
Lauren at I Was A Teenage Book Geek
411:
Andy at Random House • Andy at DFB
