I basically devoured The First Rule of Punk over the course of two days, and aw, it’s such a great middle-grade novel. Our narrator Malú is twelve, almost thirteen, and at the start of the book she’s sad about having to move from Gainesville to Chicago for two years because of her mom’s new temporary professorship there. Malú doesn’t have a lot of close friends in Gainesville, but it’s home, and she’s also going to miss her dad: her parents are divorced and her dad owns a record store; she feels culturally closer to him, because of their shared love for punk music, than she does to her Mexican American mom. (Malú’s nickname for her mom is SuperMexican, because Malú feels like she’s intensely into Mexican culture and wants Malú to be equally enthusiastic.) And she’s not exactly looking forward to starting a new school in a new place. But she doesn’t have a choice, and though school gets off to a bit of a rough start, Malú manages to make friends and to learn some things about herself, her family, and Chicanx culture in the process.
One of the most pleasing things about this book, for me, is the fact that Malú (like the author of the book) makes zines, which are incorporated into the book itself. Having read Celia C. Pérez’s zine anthology, Ofrenda, earlier this year, I knew I liked her style, and it was great to see the zines she made in Malú’s style and voice, which are fun and sometimes gorgeous (a page where Malú writes about how she’s going to miss the “Spanish moss hanging from trees like ghosts” in Gainesville has a background of tangled string, and it’s totally lovely) and also feel true to Malú’s character/the kind of zines a smart twelve-year-old would make.
The plot has enough conflict to keep things interesting (Malú decides to start a band; Malú decides to stand up for self-expression in various ways) but it’s balanced by really satisfying descriptions of daily life, like this, about October in Chicago:
I loved the sound of the leaves crunching under my shoes and the smell of wood burning. Mom and I took a trip to a farmers’ market where I discovered that there are so many different types of apples and that my new favorite food was the apple cider doughnut. I wanted to bottle up all the smells and colors and the feeling of fall so they’d always be close. I wished I could iron it all between sheets of wax paper like I’d done with the bright red maple leaf I’d mailed to Dad. And the weird thing was that when I remembered we had another fall in Chicago, I didn’t feel as unhappy as I thought I would. (221)
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