Kid B. (review)

Breslin's life is both depressed and depressing: his real mom committed suicide, his dad is always on the road, and his stepmom and his older brother are hooking up. He's a failure at school, and he's looking at a life of back-breaking work at one of the oil refineries in his hometown of Beaumont, Texas, if they'll take him without a diploma. In the cypher, though, that magical circle where break dancers defy gravity, Breslin is Kid B, a white b-boy with mad skillz. He and his Krew are looking to represent at a Throw Down in Houston, but they'll settle for beating their chief rivals, Magno Clique. The narrative arc seems on the one hand to be a Cinderella story for Kid B, but the complications of his realization of the first step of his dream (a contract to dance back-up for a famous singer, awarded as much for his race as for his talent), and the unfinished business that he leaves behind with his Krew make his escape from Beaumont more poignant than jubilant. He knows that competitive team break dancing is a substitution for real gang violence, and that it sometimes fails; he also knows that it's a physically demanding sport hampered by the misunderstanding of those outside the culture. What makes this novel distinctive, though, is the authenticity of Kid's voice. Some of the expressions and language are local to the east Texas hip-hop community (such as "liquid bar," which refers to a purple mixture of promethazine with codeine cough syrup and Sprite, known elsewhere as simply "syrup"), but most of the vocabulary is popular urban slang, and Kid B does a good job of describing the various break dance moves that he names, such as windmills, bellymills, suicides, etc. Kid's narration is fully stylized insider hip-hop fo' shizzle, making this an informative ethnography of b-boy culture for outsiders, and a great way to entice readers who are more at home on cardboard than carpet.