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Boys For Sale (2000)

by Marc Finks(Favorite Author)

3.93 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Romance

series

Boys For Sale

review 1: Definitely not a nice, light, fluffy read...Tavi is bought from his parents with the promise that he will attend a great school, get a wonderful education and make good money to help his family out. I find it hard to believe that parents sell their children but what do I know?The School only takes the best, the brightest and the most handsome boys from the poor villages. Then they are barely fed or clothed & the education that they do receive is only so they can fetch the highest dollar from dirty men.Javier is the man that runs the school. He is such an oxymoron. He is the scum of the earth selling these boys, some as young as 8 years old but on the other hand he is a loving father and husband. His wife Laura a smart attorney has no clue what he does to support his family... more in their lavish lifestyle? Some reviews said she is money hungry and always pushing him to make more and spend more? I never saw that. Naive and clueless, yes she is definitely those. Sure she spends and has nice things but she was never forcing him to get those.Mr. Finks does a great job of portraying the graphic side of this whole situation without being to graphic. Alarming yes, but no matter how innocently he portrays these situations the matter will always be graphic. Young boys being bought and used by men who should know better is tough no matter how you write about.This is a very tough read. The strength of Tavi and how these 'street rats' band together is amazing though. We complain about how bad our government is and Obamacare, etc BUT really? We are living in a fairy tale compared to these boys.
review 2: Reviews on Amazon were rather mixed for this one, so I didn't go in expecting too much.One thing that really bugged me about this story was the lack of a sense of setting. There didn't seem to be a specific place I could pin this story to - I assumed it was somewhere in the US, but the names like Tavi, Yuri, and Vikram gave it a more Asian/South East Asian feel, for example India. And then there were Sven and Francois which seem so European, and of course Javier Lopez who could really be a hispanic from the US, or Mexican, or Spanish, or just about anywhere. It was annoying to not be able to pin down a location. The beginning part of the story which gives Tavi's family background had the feel of a more Asianic village (with tigers, which pinned maybe India or SEA in my head) but when it went into the city, with skytrains and all these people with fancy names (Giovanni?), it just felt disjointed as if they'd jumped country, but they apparently hadn't. Unless it was boys from Mexico being smuggled into the US? I don't suppose it really mattered much, but seeing that Finks said several times in the beginning and the end that it's based on real life stories, it felt like there could have been a better sense of place/location to it.I felt this was also partially a factor as to why I couldn't quite identify with the characters - I had no place to associate them to. Finks skims a lot on the Tavi's early life in his village, which I felt could have been expanded much more to help you really identify or feel with Tavi. As it was, everything in the beginning felt rush and underdeveloped. Finks was also very careful with what he revealed in the early parts of the book as if he couldn't bring himself to describe any of the sexual and other abuses that were being inflicted on the boys, but towards the end, it felt as if he changed tack and over-described everything.I also had a bit of a problem with Javier Lopez. His motives for running The School House weren't strong enough - if he thought of his customers as perverts, why run the school at all? Only for the money? What caused the duality between how he saw his son and how he saw all the children he bought and sold? Overall, I would say that Finks manages to get his point across - he manages to highlight the terrible things being done to children that are kidnapped or sold into slavery - but it wasn't really quite engaging enough. The book could have benefited from a better editor. less

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