Wait Until Twilight

June 29, 2009
Pak mines the South for cliché in his trifling, melodramatic coming-of-age debut. Samuel is a 10th-grade boy and the reader's guide through the fictional backwoods town of Sugweepo, Ga. The driving force is, ostensibly, the narrator's horror and fascination with a set of wildly deformed triplets. Eventually, Samuel's encounter with the babies reveals a latent violent streak within him. But between these moments lays a wasteland wherein Samuel goes about regular high school student business. These bland filler passages sometimes lead to go-nowhere developments, such as Samuel's dead mother's friend, whom Samuel is attracted to. There is some indication she might be trying to seduce him, but the idea is quickly abandoned. The prose, meanwhile, is mundane (opening sentence: “The sun sits flat against the blue sky like someone pressed it on there with a giant thumb”). The portions of the novel dealing with the deformed babies offer some respite, but are plagued by a sloppy hammering home of the book's unsubtle and uncomplicated themes.

May 1, 2009
Paks very good first novel opens hesitantly, morphs into a gripping character study, and then overplays its own dramatic hand. Samuel, 16 and motherless, is somewhat of a misfit at school, even though he is driven by a single-minded determination to clear every academic bar placed before him, with room to spare. As he navigates the miniature and large-scale dramas of adolescent life, which intersect, diverge, and explode at a moments notice, Samuel could be any teen ripe for a good coming-of-age. Which is what happens, in a way, when he gets involved with a set of malformed infant triplets and their psychotic older brother, who gets his hooksinto Samuel, scarring the boy with the realization of his own capacity for horrific violence. The eventual resolution to the drama isnt quite worthy of its narrative environs, and Samuels struggle with his inner demons, though certainly haunting and troubling, just isnt quite matched to the thoughtful and resilient character Pak has crafted him into. Nevertheless, Pak shows that he is a careful and confident writer, somebody who clearly bears watching.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)