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The Orange Houses Paul Griffin Books

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The Orange Houses Paul Griffin Books

This book might be a bit mature for some adolescents, but it deals with topics that are important to them in a sensitive way. Griffin knows and loves his characters, so he is able to deliver what any teen or adolescent requires: authenticity. Themes of friendship, loyalty, alienation, family, achievement, conflict, and love are wrapped in a page-turner of a plot. My 12-year-old and his friend loved this book. They want to know when the movie is coming out!


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The Orange Houses Paul Griffin Books Reviews

After an incredible debut novel, Ten Mile River, Paul Griffin shows his ambition with The Orange Houses, but, sadly, his reach exceeded his grasp. Some reviewers suggest the book is best viewed as a fable, but The Orange Houses didn't work for me on an allegorical level or a realistic level. There were some nice moments in the book ( Mik's relationship with G, Mik's mom, some funny dialogue) but overall the book did not gel for me. I'm planning to read Griffin's other books to see if he gets back on track.
Why does humanity persist in slaughtering its young?

Set in the West Bronx over the course of a month's time, Paul Griffin's THE ORANGE HOUSES is the tale of three young victims of war, three refugees of sorts who come together to provide each other a path to salvation as the clock ticks down -- chapter by chapter -- to a terrible day of reckoning

Tamika (Mik)

"Meningitis struck her ten years before, when she was five. Technically her hearing loss was 'moderately severe,' what lawyers looking to sue hospitals pegged 50 percent deficient. Being halfway to sound was like never being able to catch your breath.
"She got by just fine when she kept her hearing aids turned on. She didn't much. The machines were what City Services could give her, old technology that jug handled her ears and rattled her with phone and radio static, a high-pitched whir. They sharpened and dulled everything at the same time the way water will just below the surface. But turned off and plugging up her drums, the aids screened out the world. She lived for this silky silence.

Fatima

"The women tiptoed onto the deck as if they were treading landmined sands. For nine days they had been hiding in the backup engine room of this oil tanker fit for hauling two million barrels of light sweet crude and, this time around, thirty-four refugees. Each woman's passage cost twenty-five hundred dollars. This blind faith cash had been raised a coin at a time, person by displaced person, family by fractured African family. Those who had endured were sending their best shots at survival, if not by bloodline then heritage, west.
"Of the thirty-four, most were going to Camden, where the Immigration police did not go. Camden was written off as a city lost to drugs, prostitution and the nation's highest teen mortality rate. The rest of these travelers were going to a city somewhat safer yet no less rife with illegal employment, Atlantic City. The rest save Fatima Esperer.
"Her mother had given the young woman her first name, but for her new life Fatima chose the last, a French word meaning hope. She taught herself the language from schoolbooks that somehow escaped burning -- English too. At sixteen she was headed where all told her not to go New York. She had to visit the Statue of Liberty."

Jimmi

"He left Bronx West for Basic without knowing he'd knocked up his girlfriend, the love of his life. He didn't find out she was getting heavy till he was overseas. He set the wedding for his next three-day leave. It never happened.
"One morning a five-year-old with an IED strapped to her stomach skipped past Jimmi into the heart of a city market. The bomb malfunctioned. The half explosion tore the girl apart but didn't kill her instantly. Jimmi got to her on her third to last breath. As she died she asked him something in a language he didn't understand. The wounded man next to her coughed up, 'She said, "I know I am going into a coffin, but where will my face live?"'
"PFC James Semprevivo sat in the smoking rubble and closed his eyes. He opened them nineteen days later to find out he was going home. He was eager to get back to the Bronx. His girl hadn't written him since a month before the suicide bomber. He left messages on her machine and her mother's, but neither woman called him back. Thirty feet into Bronx West he got the story. His gal lost the baby late term, then slit her wrists."

Escaping from his stay in the VA hospital and its "happy drugs," desperately trying to outrun the crack pipe, Jimmi is now a street poet, pushing a shopping cart of stuff, and living in cave -- a Depression-era unfinished subway stop that has been his refuge since discovering it as a child -- which is really not all that long ago Jimmi is still only eighteen.

Tamika, an outstanding student in a hell hole of a school, has artistic ability that few know about. Hiding behind the silence afforded by the hearing aids, she dreams that her talent will be the key to her escape. The motherless Fatima is determined to somehow succeed in New York so that she can spring her sister from the refugee camp in Africa and smuggle her into America. Fatima's ability to bring newspaper to life through her folded paper angels and other creatures has the power to release children from their pain and disarm girl thugs.

Jimmi, who has grown up knowing Tamika and who is floored by encountering Fatima, knows the two young women must meet

"What those girls could make together. With their gifts, they had a responsibility to do it, to create the beauty that went past paper and pen and sculpture and into the vibe. You can't describe it except to call it something like hope. He prayed Mik and Fatima would hook up until he remembered he was too mad at God to ask for anything."

While, arguably, Tamika experiences the greatest transformation over the course of the story, I am fascinated by how Paul Griffin creates three equally powerful characters who each serve as selfless catalysts in forever altering the lives of the other two. As with his first book, TEN MILE RIVER, I love the counterbalancing here of grit and heart, of predators and nurturers. The love and magic and community and quiet dignity I encountered throughout THE ORANGE HOUSES make me see it being far more akin to the acceptance and humanity of Naomi Shihab Nye's work than it is to typical straight-ahead contemporary YA tales.

"She set aside her sketch and thought If a city sky..."

By sowing hope in a world of hurt and tension, Paul Griffin has me believing in the power of the "If trick" Jimmi teaches the two young women, whereby you think of where you want to be or what you hope to experience, put an "If" in front of it, speak it aloud, and you are there.
YA realistic fiction, this book is told in alternating chapters from the point of view of three characters, Mik, Fatima and Jimmy. Mik is a teenage girl trying to deal with her deafness. Fatima is an illegal immigrant who befriends Mik. Jimmy is a young veteran dealing with post-traumatic stress. All three live in the same apartment project--the orange houses. Their lives interconnect in ways that will shock the reader. This book is gritty at times but is a good, quick read. I think both boy and girl readers would enjoy it. I borrowed this book from the public library. It was on the book list for a Young Adult Literature class I am taking.

[...]
The emperor has no clothes. Don't bother. I couldn't even read ten pages of this A person of one type wants to describe what goes on in the heads and lives of persons of other types, so he tries for the lowest common denominator. If art critics reviewed inner-city graffiti while sipping champagne, would you read the review?
Tedious!
Great book, characters draw you in immediately. Sheds light onto the strength of love and friendship in the midst of hardship and exposes us to our universal existential queries with honesty and poignancy.
This book might be a bit mature for some adolescents, but it deals with topics that are important to them in a sensitive way. Griffin knows and loves his characters, so he is able to deliver what any teen or adolescent requires authenticity. Themes of friendship, loyalty, alienation, family, achievement, conflict, and love are wrapped in a page-turner of a plot. My 12-year-old and his friend loved this book. They want to know when the movie is coming out!