| He Forgot to Say Goodbye | 
 enlarge | Author: Benjamin Alire Saenz
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $16.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 83641
Media: Hardcover
Reading Level: Young Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 1416949631
EAN: 9781416949633
ASIN: 1416949631
Publication Date: June 17, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"I mean, it's not as if I want a father. I have a father. It's just that I don't know who he is or where he is. But I have one."Ramiro Lopez and Jake Upthegrove don't appear to have much in common. Ram lives in the Mexican-American working-class barrio of El Paso called "Dizzy Land." His brother is sinking into a world of drugs, wreaking havoc in their household. Jake is a rich West Side white boy who has developed a problem managing his anger. An only child, he is a misfit in his mother's shallow and materialistic world. But Ram and Jake do have one thing in common: They are lost boys who have never met their fathers. This sad fact has left both of them undeniably scarred and obsessed with the men who abandoned them. As Jake and Ram overcome their suspicions of each other, they begin to move away from their loner existences and realize that they are capable of reaching out beyond their wounds and the neighborhoods that they grew up in. Their friendship becomes a healing in a world of hurt. San Antonio Express-News wrote, "Benjamin Alire Saenz exquisitely captures the mood and voice of a community, a culture, and a generation"; that is proven again in this beautifully crafted novel.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Courtesy of Teens Read Too November 14, 2008
This a novel about two young men. They seem to be opposites in many ways, yet they have in common the fact that they have never known their fathers.
Jake has had a very privileged upbringing. He really couldn't ask for more. Well, except for a father. His mom is remarried and her job is to make sure that she knows everything that's going on with Jake. It's to the point where it drives him crazy and they are constantly battling each other.
Ramiro has been poor all of his life. His mom has had to work hard as a single mother. He works, too, to help support their family. His little brother, Tito, is falling into a dangerous lifestyle. It's up to Ramiro to save him.
Though the boys have completely different lives, their paths do cross.
Can they get past their differences to find a common ground so they can help each other?
This novel revolves around the impact that an absent father can have on the life of a teenage boy.
Reviewed by: hoopsielv
 Richie's Picks: HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE June 4, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Notes from my reading, Day One:
"I didn't stop there. Of course I didn't. I just felt I had to add that I probably had a better idea of the serious philosophy of anarchy than a man like him whose addiction to order seriously undermined his feeble attempts at engaging his imagination.
"He returned my remark by reminding me that he remained unimpressed with my shallow intellectual demeanor and that nothing could disguise my obstinate, disrespectful, and undisciplined attitude. He said being a smart aleck didn't actually make me smart. And then he said it again: 'Despite your extensive, if aggressive vocabulary, you're nothing but an angry, disrespectful young man who needs a little discipline.' You see, the thing with adults is that respect is just a word they use to guilt us nonadults into doing what they want us to do. But did Mr. Alexis leave it at that? Of course not. He reminded me and Tom and John that it was a privilege to attend a pre-med magnet school and if we weren't very careful, well, we just might be sent back to a normal school. That's how he put it. A normal school. That guy, he destroys me. Where in the hell was he going to find a normal school? How can schools be normal when they're run by adults like him."
To tell you the truth, reading HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE has so far been really slow going for me. But that is only because Ben Saenz is a poet, and while there is theoretically not a line of verse in the whole book, reading it is sure causing me to treat it as if it were an exceptional volume of YA poetry. This is one of those books that I need to read aloud and then read aloud again so that I can savor the words and expressions -- English and Spanish -- of entire amazing passages.
Notes from my reading, Day Two:
I would really prefer to have an audience so that I could actually be sharing these words and expressions and entire amazing passages but, instead, I have been sitting up in my room alone, reading aloud and loudly to myself, and totally cracking up every couple of pages, particularly with the Jake monologues. Yes, there are a whole slew of passages here which are so hysterical that I am repeatedly delaying any forward motion by re-reading and re-re-reading two- and three-page passages aloud in order to cause myself to laugh all over again. (By now the family dog must think I'm in serious need of a mental health professional.) In fact, I was inspired to write the Day One notes yesterday upon reaching page 39; now -- hours of reading later -- I've just finished re-reading page 52. And I'm still sitting here cracking up.
Notes from my reading, Day Three:
HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE is a story about what it is to become a man. It is the tale of two teenage guys in El Paso, Texas who know each other on a very casual basis. What they don't yet know they have in common is that neither really knows more about his own respective father than what he has gotten from his mom and -- in Ramiro's case -- his mom's sister.
Ramiro Lopez lives with his thirty-something, single mother, who works for a physician, and his younger brother Tito (an angry, violent, drug-abusing teenager with deadened eyes who is big trouble). Ramiro attends Jefferson High School (La Jeff).
Jake Upthegrove, the self-described teen anarchist (whose attitudes and observations about adults have kept me in stitches for days) lives with his mother -- whose "work" is shopping --and his wealthy-attorney-stepfather in a home that is staffed by a full-time Mexican American maid and a part time gardener. Jake attends the pre-med magnet high school that adjoins La Jeff.
"Put it this way: The good, intelligent pre-med magnet school students 'attend their classes in a separate facility.' So we don't even have 'contact.' That's the word they use too. 'Contact.' Like they've landed on the moon. I mean, crap, what's wrong with contact? What are we gonna do to those kids, kill them? Touch them? Infect them with Mexican ways of thinking? Make them ride burros? Take their English and put it between two pieces of corn tortillas until it sounds Spanish? What? It really makes me mad. So we're all separate. I mean, the only person I know from the pre-med magnet school is this guy named Jake. We both sort of hang out in the same place on the school grounds. We don't say much -- we just sort of nod at each other. Sometimes we exchange a few words. That's it. He likes to smoke. Sometimes we talk a little bit. Not a lot. I mean, I'm not sure what to say to the guy. The thing is, I don't think either one of us fits in at school. It's a place we go to because we have to. "School is like this speed bump, and I think we're both in a hurry to move on down the road. So we both sort of hide out just off the school grounds, which is illegal. Well. not exactly illegal, but against the rules. Rules, see, they keep us in line. In line is better than chaos, I suppose. Or maybe not. Who knows?"
I'm not going to blog each succeeding day in the week that it took me to finish reading the book with all of the u-turns I made along the way. But I have, in fact, now spent a lot of quality time with Ramiro and Jake and can say that this one is right up there with my all-time favorite YAs.
From reading HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE, it is clear that becoming a man has much to do with relationships. There are relationships here between adolescent guys and other guys, with girls as friends, with girls as girlfriends, with teachers, with siblings, with neighbors, with hired help, with mothers and with themselves.
HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE is not a book that is going to be able to be taught in middle school because of the language contained in it, but it will surely appeal to many students heading into high school and this is unquestionably a book good enough to be added to a high school English curriculum.
Ben Saenz is also the author of SAMMY AND JULIANA IN HOLLYWOOD, which was up at the top of my Best of 2004 list. It is not at all going out on a limb to predict that a year from now HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE will be sitting up there on my Best of 2008 list.
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