Guess and Check (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781940724119)

Guess and Check is a Giron/Valdez Series for Unique Voices in Literature Book

"A stark, engrossing, Hemingway-esque portrait of a life spent in the margins."
--Kirkus Reviews

" . . . tough and funny and touching and harrowing."
--John Barth

"...Guess and Check is spare, subtle and deadpan, Charles Simic married to Joyce Carol Oates. A beautifully constructed delicate narrative, a near dream of a book, a place 'vulnerable to anyone who wants to break through the glass.'"
--Terese Svoboda, author of Bohemian Girl


Guess and Check is not an ordinary memoir; instead, it is a creative look at the life of a biracial boy--later seen as a young man--who adjusts with difficulty to lessons learned from the behavior of his parents and the people around him. In his rural-America world, he is an observer of dysfunction. He doesn't identify with either of his parents--his mother is Asian and his father is Caucasian--or most of the children he meets in school. He observes the addictive pattern of his artist father and the "alien" behavior of his Confucian mother, but he doesn't understand what he sees. At times he is bullied, at other times ignored, so he seeks a way out.

In this series of short stories, we observe his outsider experience which doesn't improve during his college years or his life as a young man. His quirky ideas about sex and relationships hold him back. Romantic situations usually devolve into obsessive-compulsive "acting out." Such insobriety leads him into dark, half-humorous encounters. Later, we see him as an employee for an unnamed company, where he feels anxiety that leads to surreal incidents, bordering between bad dreams and what might actually happen.

Through the experiences of life, he eventually learns to get along with others, even love the people around him, though these feelings don't come easily. As a first-time father, he observes the "alien" behavior of his child; other times, he feels as if he's sleepwalking. Yet through it all, his journey with his own family ends on a positive note.