1 of 1 copy available
Arjie is "funny."
The second son of a privileged family in Sri Lanka, he prefers staging make-believe wedding pageants with his female cousins to battling balls with the other boys. When his parents discover his innocent pastime, Arjie is forced to abandon his idyllic childhood games and adopt the rigid rules of an adult world. Bewildered by his incipient sexual awakening, mortified by the bloody Tamil-Sinhalese conflicts that threaten to tear apart his homeland, Arjie painfully grows toward manhood and an understanding of his own "different" identity.
Refreshing, raw, and poignant, Funny Boy is an exquisitely written, compassionate tale of a boy's coming-of-age that quietly confounds expectations of love, family, and country as it delivers the powerful message of staying true to one's self no matter the obstacles.
"Adult intolerance of difference and the process of coming out as a gay teenager are given fresh perspective and rare insight." —San Francisco Chronicle
"A great deal more than a gay coming-of-age novel . . . Selvadurai writes as sensitively about the emotional intensity of adolescence as he does about the wonder of childhood." —The New York Times Book Review
"There's not a shred of false optimism in this delicately balanced coming-of-age novel by Selvadurai, a remarkably talented young writer." —Entertainment Weekly
"Compassionate and mature . . . blessed with both a deftness of touch and a seriousness of purpose. An auspicious debut." —Montreal Gazette
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
March 19, 2024 -
Formats
-
Kindle Book
-
OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780062383464
- File size: 596 KB
-
EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780062383464
- File size: 1627 KB
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Levels
- Lexile® Measure: 780
- Text Difficulty: 3-4
-
Reviews
-
March 4, 1996
Set in Sri Lanka, this poignant coming-of-age novel charts a boy's loss of innocence as he grapples with family conflict, political realities and his homosexuality. At seven, narrator Arjun Chelvaratnam hates sports and enjoys wearing his aunt's jewelry and playing the role of bride in imaginary weddings; yet his playmates' taunts of ``girlie-boy'' and ``faggot'' don't seem all that different from the monickers that attach to other children (e.g., ``fatty-boom-boom'' and ``Diggy-Nose''). But when Arjun enters his teens, his worried father, a wealthy hotelier, sends him to a strict private academy, hoping it will force his son ``to become a man.'' Instead, Arjun, rebelling against a sadistic principal, strikes up an intense friendship with a fellow renegade pupil, Shehan, who is rumored to be gay. After their first sexual encounter. Arjun's immediate feelings are anger and guilt, but he gradually comes to accept his sexuality and his love for Shehan. The story is shot through with the tensions and bloody violence between Sri Lanka's Buddhist Sinhalese majority and its Hindu Tamil minority. In loving Shehan, a Sinhalese, Arjun, who is Tamil, breaks two taboos. Retribution follows, and in 1983 Arjun and his family migrate to Canada as penniless refugees. With deft humor and a keen eye, Selvadurai, who was born in Sri Lanka and now lives in Toronto, captures his protagonist's difficult passage into his own identity-of which his homosexuality is just one component. And it is with deep, wistful feeling that he ties that story to larger themes of family and country. Author tour. -
April 1, 2015
This Lambda Literary Award-winning 1994 coming-of-age story tracks a boy from a wealthy Tamil family in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from ages seven to 14, culminating in the 1983 Sinhala-Tamil riots.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
-
June 16, 1997
A "poignant... deep, wistful" novel of growing up gay in Sri Lanka, wrote PW.
-