Trash - Anak-Anak Pemulung (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
Raphael, Gardo, and Rat are street boys living in the Behala dumpsite in the Philippines. All they want is to get enough money for them and the rest of their family to survive. But one fateful day, they find something mysterious, so mysterious that even the police come looking for it. They must hide it, and fast! Then, something completely unthinkable happens! Trash is a story of standing up for yourself, being selfless, and revealing corruption. I feel a little guilty about not liking this book more than I do. It ought to be likeable. It's set in the slums. Poor children sifting through rubbish. It's a heart-string puller and no mistake. The sort of book that makes you want to go out and give money to charidee. This is Live Aid set to fiction. Some people have loved it to bits. It's a miraculous book, they say. A work of genius. Life changing. Brilliant.And yet, and yet ... For a very simple and very short book, I had a number of problems with it. The writing is very sparse. Whilst that can be a good thing because it gives room for your imagination, it can also come across as ... very sparse. It's a marmite book. You'll either love it or hate it. I could have done with a little more description. A little too sparse.The story is told from multiple POVs (points of view). That's okay if it's done well. But in Trash all the different voices sounded more or less the same to me, whether it was an educated adult or a slum child speaking.The book starts strongly. It is an intriguing premise to set an adventure amongst a slum community living off trash. The initial mystery is set up well. For the first third of the book (during a half hour train journey), I was moderately interested in what was going on.A third of the book in half an hour? Yup. It is only a short book and the lean writing means that it is easy on the eye.But then the book goes all Dan Brown on us. There is a treasure map, a code, enigmatic clues. And I simply could not suspend disbelief enough to believe that a gang of uneducated street kids could turn into mini Robert Langdons. We seem to morph from a believable story to "the famous five go recycling" in the blink of an eye. At the end of the book the author gives us an info-dump about the codes, and that explained a lot. It's something that the author was interested in and so wanted to shoe-horn into the book, even if it didn't quite fit.Add in a hurried (and equally hard to believe) ending, and we have a book that had me then lost me. A great premise that didn't deliver.A shame. This was a book that I wanted to like. It almost feels a sin to be unmoved by a book set in such squalid conditions. Some people will love it. Some people will feel they ought to love it. I sort of liked it.
What do You think about Trash - Anak-Anak Pemulung (2012)?
Nice summer read-appropriate length, good characters, nice resolution. Good youth fiction!
—shaidie
Brilliant! Strangely educational due to it teaching you about the slums.
—alshea
Nice mystery in an different setting. quick read.
—krista
