Truancy Origins » (First Edition)

ISAMU FUKUI was seventeen years old when his first novel, Truancy, was published to rave reviews and significant publicity, including three interviews on National Public Radio and features in The New York Daily News and Esquire.com. He lives in New York, New York.

In this suspenseful and gripping prequel to teen novelist Isamu Fukui's acclaimed debut novel, TRUANCY, the origins of the conflict between the despotic Mayor and his sons are revealed.

School Library Journal

Gr 8 Up—Zen and Umasi, the teenaged adopted sons of the mayor of Education City, rebel against the rigid strictures of society and the educational system and join the outcasts on the streets. But they have very different values and goals. Zen is determined to destroy the school and the City and establish himself as leader of the Truancy, a company of teens who have been expelled, while his gentler, more humane brother wants to protect the common people of the City, even if it means destroying his own brother. Fukui's second novel reads like a futuristic Lord of the Flies with gangs of boys running wild through an urban jungle battling one another and the Enforcers (for those of us who lived through the 1960s, the word "pigs" springs immediately to mind). Fukui's dramatic and compelling dystopian world will initially capture the imaginations of teens who are disenchanted with school and home and the limitations imposed upon them by adults. Unfortunately, the overwrought writing style, stock characters, underdeveloped plot, and nonstop mayhem are unlikely to hold their interest.—Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage Public Library, AK