Paris Carter

In Kim Fu’s vivid debut novel, you learn about the life of Peter Huan, who is the only boy out of his parents four children. But even though Peter is the only boy in the household and his father wants him to grow up and follow in his footsteps at being a strong man, Peter wants nothing more in the world than to be a beautiful woman like his oldest sister Adele.

For Today I’m A Boy, suffers from slow pacing, with little to nothing going on throughout the exposition and then becomes slightly more interesting in the middle, where you find comfort in Peter’s life as a mid-adult trying to make new friends. But the slow part last for the first one hundred pages, where you have to sit and read about Peter’s life from when he’s born all the way up to his forties.

Kim Fu’s style of writing reminds me a lot of the way Khaled Hosseini wrote his debut novel The Kite Runner. They both look at the a single character and you watch them grow up as the novel continues on, but the only thing that separates the two novels is that in The Kite Runner the setting is alive and there’s tension in For Today I’m A Boy you just sit and wait around as you feel as if something’s missing.

The only thing that saves this novel from its slow pace, is the interesting, well developed characters who keep you glued to the novel. When the story begins you start off with Peter and his family of his six sisters and his father and mother, but as the story keeps going and Peter starts to grow up and get a job, there starts to be more characters who you get to meet and the plot starts to pick up and become more interesting.

Description in this novel is solid and comes in small doses that are injected in all of the right spots that make you coon for more.

Kim Fu writes with an intriguing style that I can’t wait to see where it takes her in the literary world with her next novel. I recommended this novel to anyone who thinks they can sit through a boring spell to get to the good parts.