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David Yoo

Girls for Breakfast Mass Market Paperback – September 12, 2006

by David Yoo (Author)

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Nick Park loves girls.

Drumstick legs, cherry-colored lips, dumpling cheeks . . . everything about them he wants to eat up. But he’s dateless and has been since he discovered girls in the third grade, and he’s convinced himself that this is solely based on the fact that he’s the only Korean American teenager in Renfield—the fifth richest (and WASPiest) town in Connecticut. In Nick’s mind, he sticks out like a banana in a wheat field.

And now it’s time for him to figure it out once and for all. Is it all in his head or are his suspicions that his heritage is keeping him from a triumphant boob fest true?

An excerpt from Girls for Breakfast:
What confused me about involuntarily visualizing Miss Hamilton with no clothes on was that she wasn’t even pretty. Her nose was pointy and her frizzy hair always looked sweaty, but I couldn’t stop picturing her naked. I also couldn’t stop picturing Martha the bus driver naked every time I stepped on the bus. I was a perverted Superman. As the bell rang I silently vowed to stop staring at the Playboys at night in order to get the rest crucial to curing me. I glared at Miss Hamilton’s breasts and shook a fist at her bare butt as she faced the chalkboard. I knew in my heart I’d beat this disease.

From the Hardcover edition.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Laurel Leaf
Publication date

September 12, 2006
Grade level

9 - 12
Reading age

14 years and up
Dimensions

4.13 x 0.78 x 6.88 inches
ISBN-10

0440238838
ISBN-13

978-0440238836
See all details

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Girls For Breakfast performs the neat trick of taking the misery of adolescence and transforming it into fiction that is funny, engrossing, and perceptive. David Yoo is a talented writer with lots to say about sex, ethnicity, and whitebread suburbia."
-Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of Little Children and Election

“Funny, dark, and subversive. Beware: you’ll never be able to look at a guy the same way after you read this book."
-Rachel Cohn, bestselling author of Shrimp and Gingerbread

From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

David Yoo is a graduate from Skidmore with an MFA in creative writing from University of Colorado. He resides in Boston without his cat.

From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

SUNDAY

10:00 AM

I'm standing on top of the water tower behind my house, thinking about my death and the inevitable bronze statue the graduating class will erect in my memory. Today is supposedly the most important day of my life so far because I'll be graduating from high school this afternoon--and yet here I am, the only senior skipping commencement rehearsal right now. The rest of my class has fanned out in waves into the woods beyond the football field in a frantic search for me. Some are joking at first, grateful to have a break from sitting on metal folding chairs in the hot sun, but before long it's obvious this is serious: Nick Park is missing.
The rumor mill has started churning, based on lies, but nobody knows the truth, so they have to rely on a nameless student hollering that he witnessed me entering the woods to take a leak. An hour passes before I'm finally discovered; word spreads quickly that I was attacked in midpiss by a bear in heat or something. Is there still time to dedicate the graduation ceremony to me, or have the programs already been printed?

Renfield High School
Commencement, June 18, 19
Dedicated in loving memory of Nick Park
(July 6, 19__-June 18, 19__)
Senior Nick Park, who for four years was the number one tennis player at Renfield High, was mauled to death by a Kodiak Long Cut bear, just hours prior to this ceremony. The cause of death is precisely how we should always remember Nick: courageously fighting a semistarved and therefore far more aggressive than usual man-eater. Preliminary autopsy reports of the bear's intestines suggest--since all the bones in both hands and feet were broken prior to being playfully gnawed at and eaten--that Nick refused to turn himself into a ball and instead went down swinging and kicking. Tragic as this morning's events have been, it is fitting that Nick, in death, has once again personified all that is great about this year's graduating class. The Class of__refused to bow to the frustration of having to use temporary lockers for one semester, and took the initiative and handled the reconstruction of the cafeteria during the spring with aplomb by creating the Brown Bag picnic series, which will continue at Renfield High in the future; Nick similarly refused to cave in to unfortunate circumstances and fought for what is just, in this case the right to urinate in peace and with dignity.

The statue will be unveiled this fall in a private ceremony at the edge of the woods behind the football field. All the football players will tap or head-butt it for luck before running out onto the field at the start of home games. I'll become a local folk hero for simply peeing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Toxicology reports released to the public will detail the abnormal amount of adrenaline in my system; I did everything I could to fend off the bear, even as I slipped in and out of consciousness following the first in a series of strangely alligatorish, furry death rolls.
I'm having trouble picturing the statue. It depicts the final struggle, teenager versus bear, but it's hard to picture my face--specifically, my eyes. I have to admit I'm picturing myself wearing sunglasses, further proof that I am a banana: white on the inside, yellow on the outside, because surely only a banana or a blind guy would picture a bronzed likeness of himself wearing fucking sunglasses.
Though after last night I'd be lucky to be memorialized in balsa.

I'll admit there's something majorly wrong with me if a bronze statue depicting my graphic mauling feels like an acceptable alternative to entering the real world this fall. Tilsen College--a small liberal arts school in upstate New York--is the ultimate microcosm of today's society, where I'll get my first taste of something besides sheltered New England life based on the fact that the student body is composed of prep school and public school kids from thirty-six states; where I'll be surrounded by at least 9 percent blacks, Hispanics, and Pacific Islanders (i.e., Samoans and me); where I'll share community bathrooms with flaming gays who aren't necessarily members of the drama club and tall girls, truckloads of really tall girls that I'll think are beautiful, because college is when I'll finally start appreciating them. My surroundings will be different, and hopefully so will I.
So then why am I all alone on a water tower during the rehearsal for what should be the greatest celebration of the most significant day of my life up till now? That much I do have an answer to: it's because I can't stop thinking about what happened last night.
The majority of my shortcomings can legitimately be blamed on the town I live in and my clueless parents. I'm just your average guy. I like girls, therefore I like parties because that's where girls are, therefore I am forced to give two shits about popularity. That doesn't make me shallow--it makes me normal. And how can a normal guy find himself completely alone on the last real day of high school?
This, my friends, is the question.
It wasn't until my first year here that I noticed that being Asian meant being different, and it coincided with the start of a lifelong proclivity toward lying. This was also around the time when I first noticed girls, which I guess means it was when things started to fall apart.

From the Hardcover edition.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Laurel Leaf (September 12, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0440238838
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0440238836
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
Grade level ‏ : ‎ 9 - 12
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.13 x 0.78 x 6.88 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #9,127,495 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,326 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Boys' & Men's Issues (Books)
- #4,950 in Teen & Young Adult Humorous Fiction

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Breakfast of Champions

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 10, 2006

David Yoo's novel feels a little overextended: did he really have to begin the saga of Nick Park from all the way back in third grade? But in general he knows how to tell a story and capture the reader's attention right away. Nick doesn't have many Korean friends, and he's ashamed of the way his mother serves Korean kimchee with her cheeseburgers, ashamed of his dad's heavy accent. "Hey Mr Park," Mitch said. "Hello, Meech," my dad said. I flinched. Mitch and Paul laughed; they thought he was hilarious. His accent sounded more pronounced around my friends. Other Asian kids in the Korean church Nick sometimes attends call him a "banana," -- yellow on the outside, white on the inside. And yet Yoo makes Nick's struggles with his contested masculinity into a rewarding and heartwarming tale.

He's good at tennis, and that makes him a few friends. And he draws well, so he gets put in the poster club at high school--a wealthy suburb where some of his pals live in actual mansions: Paul's got an bowling alley in his basement. At the same time he is sometimes tolerated, but racist bullies make his life a hell, as when one know-nothing calls him "Long Duk Dong" after the comic exchange student from SIXTEEN CANDLES. Racial epithets fly all over the place in GIRLS FOR BREAKFAST, and there's no safe place for a boy like Nick. The girls he lusts after aren't all that interested in him, but there's always Miss January from an old issue of Playboy. She's been sitting in his closet for ten years or more, and whenever life gets tough for him, he hauls her out and starts spanking it. (In one amusing scene he looks up and finds the cat, Boris, has been watching him [...], so he pulls up his shorts and tries to distract Boris from this traumatic memory. Now, that's self-effacing!)

Apparently David Yoo had the great luck to be able to work with the late, great fiction writer Lucia Berlin, a lady who died way too soon and whose books (published by Black Sparrow and other midrange presses) are pretty much out of print, and who stands the risk of being forgotten. I think Lucia Berlin, one of the finest writers in recent memory, would have been proud of Woo her student; he shares something of her intense interest in humanity, her gifts of penetrating dialogue and concrete observation, and quite a lot of her big-hearted humor, the laugh that could warm one's bones. I expect that GIRLS FOR BREAKFAST, even with its occasional lapses in taste, and its infrequent longueurs, introduces us to a masterful voice.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Robert S. Warner

Funny and honest

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 19, 2009

I just finished Yoo's "Girls for Breakfast". I really don't like spoilers, so I won't include any here. The narrator of the novel,Nick, is soooo funny, that I couldn't put it down and finished it in a couple of sittings. Nick wants it all with typical teen bravado, but is also incredibly insecure. I read a fair bit of YA lit. (I'm a teacher), and I was really grateful that Yoo doesn't have some big moment of clarity where the character figures out all his problems and does the right thing at just the right time(this ruins many similar books). Instead, his narrator is just a big ball of raging hormones and confusion and contradictions. I'd say the only downside of this novel is all the pop culture allusions. They had me dying from laughter from the first couple of pages ("Kodiak Long Cut bear"), but they might be confusing to a 16 year old who didn't grow up in the 80's. Overall, hilarious and painfully honest. I would definitely recommend this to smart teens.

One person found this helpful

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Teen Reads

Very clever and hilarious

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 28, 2005

A very clever and funny cover that resembles a cereal box greets readers of GIRLS FOR BREAKFAST. This witty read chronicles the story of Nick Park, who is missing his high school graduation rehearsal to think back over what led him to humiliate himself in front of a wonderful girl the night before at his Prom.

Nick is the only Korean in his white suburb, and he begins to think that his race might be the cause of his unpopularity. As he reflects over everything he has done through junior and senior high, though, he realizes that he has never been comfortable with anything about himself, and that there may be other reasons why he has trouble with girls.

Nick's stories are as funny as they are cringe-worthy, and everyone will recognize themselves in some of his embarrassing escapades. From offering fake martial arts lessons to gain friends as a boy, to trying to ignore the Korean church youth group his parents desperately want him to join, Nick has tried too hard to avoid his true self and to be like people he perceives as popular.

It all comes to a head at the Prom and it takes hours of reflection the next day for Nick to sort through what will happen next. Readers will only receive hints until the end of the book, but they will be too busy enjoying Nick's funny and ironic narration about himself.

--- Reviewed by Amy Alessio

5 people found this helpful

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K. Kincy

Ingredients: wicked humor and incredibly embarrassing moments

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 11, 2007

I started reading GIRLS FOR BREAKFAST on the half-hour bus ride home, and I smirked all the way there. There's so much wicked humor in this book. I'm not Korean and I'm certainly not a guy, but I totally identified with Nick Park. He's both flawed and sympathetic. I laughed hard at his childhood memories of teaching fake martial arts to his friends, his mom's horrible cooking, and his incredibly embarrassing moments around girls and pretty much everyone else. Many times I was smiling and sighing, "Poor guy." Nick manages to come across both awkward and sweet. He seems real enough that I might run into him one day. I very much recommend this book.

Helpful

Eric Vale

Very good book. Great read.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 25, 2005

This is a wonderfully-written, highly-entertaining, and often hilarious novel. Nick Park's just a kid and he's just trying to get by. And yeah, he likes girls. It's nice to see a young adult book tackle the subject of blooming masculinity head on, and Yoo skillfully weaves the issues of race, gender, and sexuality into an intelligent, humorous story. The book will make you laugh throughout, and the ending is beautiful.

6 people found this helpful

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T. Nam

completely relatable, utterly engrossing, outrageously entertaining

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 7, 2007

I'm not a teen, but just feel like one, reading this excellent semi-autobiographical fiction. Funny and touching, reminiscent of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers, but for teens. This quick paced books will make you laugh, grimace in embarrassment and shared angst, and root, root, root for Nick.

One person found this helpful

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