cover image Boy Genius

Boy Genius

Yongsoo Park, Young Soo Park. Akashic Books, $14.95 (228pp) ISBN 978-1-888451-24-5

Filmmaker Yonsoo Park's debut, Boy Genius, follows the life of its eponymous protagonist through a surreal stew of politics, betrayal, race and identity. BG falls from grace as a state-sponsored child TV star in Korea and heads to America with his parents. He spends his adolescence rebelling against his teachers in a teeming East Coast slum; when his parents are killed, he heads to California, where surgery transforms him into a Caucasian. Fraught with bizarre plot twists and impossible coincidences, Park's unique characters inhabit a dark, violent and paranoid world in which nothing and no one is as it appears.