Jeff Hobbs’ Show Me You’re Good focuses on teenage boys trying to get into college — and manhood — in Los Angeles.
Some are charter school students from desperately poor, immigrant families. Others go to Beverly Hills High.
“Whether they are wealthy or poor, Hispanic or white, from stable families or chaotic ones, the boys here seem to be looking for ways to prove themselves,” writes Naomi Schaefer Riley. “At a time of life when earlier generations of young men might have been helping to support a family or even defend their country, these boys are preparing for the SATs or writing personal essays or engaged in mock-trial competitions.”
Hobbs offers us the example of Carlos, whose parents came here illegally from Mexico but who manages to get into Yale, following in his brother’s footsteps. Sometimes he is grateful, but other times he wonders about the fates of his classmates and the strangeness of the fact that he is being rewarded with the highest honors in American society while his parents are constantly worried about deportation.
One of the middle-class students, with a Jewish father and Chinese immigrant mother, grows up knowing his parents had “chosen to spend much of their income on a rental unit within one of the most expensive zip codes in the country, giving up space and disposable income for the guarantee of a good, free primary education.” He is “reminded of this sacrifice constantly.”
“From the boy who was conceived using a sperm donor to the one whose dad tells him he will never amount to anything, the importance of fathers and the devastation wrought by their absence are everywhere in this book,” writes Riley.
Teachers try to help, but schools can’t do it all.