Palo Alto has a great premise. It's all punk ass kids running around California in the '90s. They're doing drugs, having sex, fighting each other....normal teen stuff. But this was like.....kinda racist and definitely sexist. Which is incredibly odd given that this was written in 2010 and released as a movie in 2013. It's just very problematic throughout the entire book.
The sad part is, even with all the disgusting shit James Franco wrote, it made sense for the characters. Each character he wrote about was so incredibly flat. Regardless of whose POV it was at the time, all the other characters were only there to serve a purpose for whoever was speaking. Every single person was a means to an end. That whole thing just felt so gross.
It bothered me reading the first story in the book. This story was titled "Halloween" and detailed the night that a rich, white boy got into a drunk driving accident, killed a woman, and somehow had zero freaking consequences.
In the story titled "American History" we get a pro-con argument for slavery??? Oh and this is where we see the N word for the first time.....it comes up again.
But I think the story "Chinatown" takes the cake. This story is by far the most cringe-worthy story in the book. A half-Vietnamese girl moves to town and they immediate stereotype her, calling her names that I don't feel comfortable repeating. On top of that, one of the teens begins pimping her out all over town. It ends with the teens laughing about their rape and sodomy charges and how they'll get away with it.
The whole thing was just absolutely disgusting and I would not recommend this to anyone, ever.
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