Kung Fu High School

July 18, 2005
The student body of the titular high school is armed, girded with armor and versed in martial arts in this ultraviolent, dystopian debut novel from Gattis, the spawn of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Cormier. With a corrupt, ineffectual administration, Kung Fu High has become a prisonlike society ruled by gangs and neglected by the law. The novel's teenage warrior narrator, Jen B., tells the story of her cousin Jimmy Chang, a world champion martial artist and hero to his peers who vows to his mother that he'll never fight again after he's arrested for drubbing a band of thugs. But Jimmy faces a brutal initiation ritual when he transfers to Kung Fu High, a beating he takes without resistance until Jen's brother, Cue, attacks Jimmy's tormenters. Cue, in turn, is murdered, and Jen must negotiate complex school politics while fighting for survival and trying to avenge her brother's death. Jimmy, her only trusted ally, must break his pacifist vow or see his cousin destroyed. With clinical detachment, Gattis splashes graphic descriptions of violence and gore throughout the novel. The " 'gangbanger' Armageddon" final chapters of this story may feel predictable, but the martial arts mayhem is as detailed and balletic as a John Woo movie.