CCLaP: Turtle and Dam

On Monday, CCLaP celebrated the birth of another book!

Say hello to Scott Abraham's Turtle and Dam

Turtle and Dam is Scott's literary debut, and if you enjoy literature that elbows cultural references and differences in the ribs, you'll find a lot to love in here. It pokes fun at so much and yet it tells such a serious story about going after what you believe in. 

Turtle - a twenty something year old American educated Chinese man and recent college graduate - is desperately hunting for a job. He is also incredibly full of himself. Hilarity and head-biffs ensue as the reader follows him into the unexpected and incredibly awkward career of newspaper journalism. 

Like millions of other only-child Chinese twenty-somethings, Turtle Chen is graduating college and vicariously desperate (via parental pressure) to find a job, though he would probably settle for a girlfriend. He speaks English. He studied abroad in America. Employers, ladies, what's not to love? With a bit of bravado and some hometown luck, this engineering grad lands himself an entry level position working for the state news agency; not that he particularly cares about politics or journalism, not that they particularly want him to. Through a class assignment, Turtle learns that his grandmother's village will soon be inundated to make way for a dam construction project. His parents tell him not to worry about it. His bosses tell him not to worry about it. He would be only too happy to oblige, and yet despite his best efforts not to care he finds himself on the front lines fighting bulldozers, next to what some villagers claim to be the ghost of Chairman Mao. There's bribery, corruption, computer games, and text messages imbued with uncertainty. Air pollution, censorship, and a job fair where students attack employers with paper basketballs. And it's all told through the eyes of a young man with impeccable English ('impeccable English,' that's correct, yes?), who's right there in the middle of it all. 

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Check out what people have been saying about it:

Scott Navicky, one of CCLaP's very own authors, says: 

"Turtle and Dam is a book to cherish. It’s smart, insightful, and extremely funny. In particular, Abrahams’ ability to humorously weave together the foreign and the familiar is nothing short of astounding."

Lixian, the blogger behind Word, Notes, and Fiction says: 

"Turtle and Dam was an enjoyable read ... funny and relatable."

Goodreads user Joshua Marshack says:

"[F]or ragers against the rat-race, for anyone that's struggled with life and love, I wholeheartedly recommend this book."

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Turtle and Dam is available as a traditional paperback or you can download it for free, as with all of our other titles, as a digital file. Happy reading!