I Am a Boy

7 hrs. 8 min.

Miscellaneous

Language Russian

Author Maxim Kulakov

Narrator Alexander K.

Description

The 90s through the eyes of a teenager from an “unfortunate neighborhood.” Harsh truth about growing up “by the rules” told by a 16-year-old author.

Like *The Catcher in the Rye*, only with a blade tucked in his waistband and swear words in the language. Without any embellishments—about what the street really lives by.

You are holding a book that breaks out of the usual boundaries. It’s a story of the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s—dense, vivid, captured with precision and without mercy; for an unprepared reader, it can be enough to overwhelm and even shock. The characters are teenagers for whom “concepts” matter more than the rules familiar to “respectable” families. At home they keep silent about what happens to them outside—and it’s easy to understand why. In their world, rudeness and cruelty are not the exception, but the norm: a way to live and survive. The narrator, the main character, thinks of himself as weak—but it is precisely him, unlike his peers, who manages not to become part of the violence and to resist it.

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