What do readers think of The All-American by Joe Milan Jr.? Write your own review.

The All-American was a very interesting book. It had humor, tragedy, friendship, family relationships and pride all rolled into one. This story of a teenage boy begins in America and takes you to Korea. It has so many feelings in it that you really feel like you are living the story through Bucky. The book is well written and spanned different cultures. I learned some things about the Korean culture that I didn't know. The emotions in this book are heartfelt (happiness, sadness, fear, pride, hope, love, hate). It was a quick read, because it was hard to put down. I highly recommend this book!

I'd like to give the book 4.5 stars. The beginning pulled me in though there were some spots in the book that were a bit slower and the last part I could not put down. Some parts may seem unbelievable but people we meet can be wacky and the situations even wackier. I appreciated the protagonist comparing his situations to football tactics, training and formations. I also enjoyed the exposure to different cultures and the idea of fitting in or not fitting in. I welcomed the variety of characters and their idiosyncrasies. I would recommend this book for book clubs as there are a number of situations and individuals to discuss.

What a great book - and so timely - about a teenager ("Bucky") living in Washington state who is deported to his birth country of South Korea. While this book is a very easy read, the subject matter is serious and intense. Yet, the author manages to infuse humor into Bucky's experiences, helping to alleviate some of the hardships he must endure.
I really enjoyed this book and recommend it for anyone interested in an immigrant's story told from the perspective of a teenager who knows little about his birth country.

The lead character, Bucky, (and many more monikers as his experiences continued) takes the reader on a forced whirlwind trip to South Korea where he was born but knows not a word of Korean. He is a flawed young man who gains the reader's interest, if not sympathy, early on. He has a chip on his shoulder and limited life experience and finds himself deep in the kimchi barrel page after page after page. A good (4) coming of age story for older teens, young adults. The story dragged in places, especially once he was in the military and pages could be cut. This book wouldn't be my book club's cup of tea, which consists of retired women; but I will be telling them about how surprisingly easy it is for a young person to lose control once out of his own country as evidenced by some of his serious predicaments, which I think were fiction imitating life. There is sex, foul language, bawdy humor.

Bucky a young Korean American high school senior is arrested. He is considered an immigrant and is deported from Washington State the only home he knows. He is put on a plane to South Korea. He knows nothing of South Korea, no knowledge of the land or the language. His attorney says think of it as a short vacation! But vacation it is not! His goal is to return to the United States, attend college and play football. The author takes Bucky and us on a wild ride. It is amazing what he goes through trying to return home. It is a fast read, hard to put down. A well written book. I know book clubs will have a lot to discuss.

All Bucky has ever wanted to do is play college football, even if it means he will be a walk-on on a community college team. But, just as this dream looks possible, an unknown reality snatches the ball right out of his hands. Bucky is unknowingly an undocumented immigrant according to misfiled documents and is being deported back to his birthplace, South Korea and being immersed into a culture he knows nothing about and a language he does not read or write.

In this blunt story with no-nonsense consequences, Bucky has many hurdles and faces each as he just needs one more play to make this nightmare go away, even as he questions, who am I and what is my past and more importantly what is my future.
Milan does a great job holding the tension in the storyline and as a reader several times I was holding my breath as Bucky is so close to escaping his situations and then Milan reels me back in with the next challenge.

Bucky's personality kept me grounded in this story as one absurdity after another at times felt like one too many, but unfortunately for many this is reality, just change the character name and the birth country.

Reading this book was a challenge for me. The book's core subject regarding our country's treatment of immigrants and refugees-especially children-is something that I want to learn more about. I even like football and understood the references made in the book. It was Bucky's male teenage angst and sexual references and exploits where I was unable to relate. Also many of his experiences in Korea seemed unrealistic while at the same time the ending was too simple.

My favorite line from the book appears in Chapter 53 and is made in reference to the Korean military, who "don't believe in mistakes. But every pencil has an eraser." In a set of circumstances, some caused by the main character's anger and errors in judgment and others created through sets of random (often absurd) situations, "Bucky" is ordered to serve his mandatory year in the Korean military. The problems with that being,
(a) he has lived in the United States (Washington state) his entire life not having been in Korea since early childhood and never having learned the culture or language, and
(b) he doesn't believe he is a Korean citizen due to being brought to the US by his father, who paid an American girlfriend to "raise him in a better place" and then returned to Korea.

For me, the best parts of this book are the references to outdated immigration policies and layers of bureaucracies that even the family's lawyers cannot defend against and Bucky's first-hand accounts of being stuck in limbo between the two countries—not really a citizen of either but claimed by an entity that really only counts him as a duty-bound body.

I wish those parts of Bucky's story could have been told against a different backdrop, but the author uses analogies with and comparisons to American football to make many points and justify others. He also uses often-ludicrous, ill-fitting experiences in the Korean military to demonstrate roadblocks to Bucky's American return.

I do feel that the author did a good job of tying up an excess of loose ends by the book's end, and I felt that the main character's resolution was realistic—especially when set against his journey!

I would recommend this book for more advanced YA readers and, especially, for readers looking to filter through a long story in order to find a better understanding of the personal costs of immigration on children as well as the difficult positions that undocumented youth—particularly children of undocumented parents, or DACA Dreamers—who have never lived in their parents' homeland are forced to face.