Crossing

By:  Andrew Xia Fukuda

From Goodreads:  A loner in his all-white high school, Chinese-born Xing (pronounced “Shing”) is a wallflower longing for acceptance. His isolation is intensified by his increasingly awkward and undeniable crush on his only friend, the beautiful and brilliant Naomi Lee. Xing’s quiet adolescent existence is rattled when a series of disappearances rock his high school and fear ripples through the blue collar community in which he lives. Amidst the chaos surrounding him, only Xing, alone on the sidelines of life, takes notice of some peculiar sightings around town. He begins to investigate with the hope that if he can help put an end to the disappearances, he will finally win the acceptance for which he has longed. However, as Xing draws closer to unveiling the identity of the abductor, he senses a noose of suspicion tightening around his own neck. While Xing races to solve the mystery and clear his name, Crossing hurtles readers towards a chilling climax.

I had read a little blurb about this book on Goodreads and it sounded interesting so I set out to find it.  Couldn't find it anywhere locally.  Bookstores, libraries, nowhere.  Bizarre!  I talked to the librarian about an interlibrary loan and she said it was too new?  Uh ok.  So she said they would put in a request to purchase it.  Eventually, they got it in.   You needed to know all that right?  I'm disclosing where I got the book!

Overall, I liked the book.  I thought it a little weird.  I kinda thought it would be a little more of a murder mystery and it wasn't really.  I thought Xing would really be actively trying to solve the crime based on the summary, but that wasn't exactly true.  It was more of an awkward teen stumbling over the criminal kinda thing.

I had a lot of issues with the topics of racism against Asians in this book.  It was overkill I thought.  However, I'm not Asian and I don't know what they deal with on a daily basis.  I thought there was way too much focus on Seung-Hui Cho and the Virginia Tech massacre.  I felt like it it was detrimental in two ways.  Seung-Hui Cho is Korean and the main character is Chinese.  If you're writing a book fussing at white people about racism and lumping all Asians together, don't do it yourself.  Secondly, it only mentioned Columbine once.  If you're going to constantly reference school shootings there are a lot to pick from and if you use several, you date your book so much.  By sticking with Virginia Tech so much it puts your book in just one time period.  That's just my opinion anyway.