Zen and the Art of Faking It

About Zen and the Art of Faking It

Zen and the Art of Faking It is a young adult novel by Jordan Sonnenblick, published by Scholastic. It follows thirteen-year-old San Lee, who has the kind of adolescent experience that might be described as a series of fresh starts — specifically, a series of moves to new towns that have made him an expert at quick social navigation.

When San's latest relocation brings him to a small Pennsylvania town, he is determined to find a way to stand out and make a mark before the next move inevitably comes. The opening he finds is in his prior knowledge of Zen Buddhism — information he absorbed from a previous school — which gives him the material to construct a persona: the enigmatic, spiritually advanced new student who speaks in koans and projects a kind of deliberate calm that his new classmates find genuinely compelling.

The Problem with a Good Lie

The novel's central tension is built into the premise: the better San is at being a Zen master, the more people start taking him seriously. A girl he likes. A teacher who is genuinely interested. A community that begins to treat his carefully crafted persona as a resource. Faking something that turns out to help people — while also resting on a foundation of fabrication — puts San in an increasingly uncomfortable position.

Sonnenblick writes this with the same combination of humor and emotional honesty that characterizes all of his work. San's predicament is genuinely funny, but it is also a real moral dilemma: what do you do when the person you're pretending to be is someone people need? And what does it mean that the wisdom you've been dispensing — even if it came from a book rather than deep personal practice — has been real wisdom?

Identity, Reinvention, and Middle School

Sonnenblick is particularly good at writing characters who are figuring out who they are in environments that are not designed to make that easy. San's repeated experience of being the new kid has made him adaptable, but adaptability is not the same as having a self. The novel asks, with affection and humor, what happens when the mask you put on starts to feel more real than the face you thought was underneath it.

Why Zen and the Art of Faking It Has Been Challenged

The novel has been banned in North East Independent School District in Texas. For a gentle middle-grade novel about a kid who gets too good at pretending to be a Buddhist, the removal is difficult to characterize as a response to genuinely harmful content. The challenges to Sonnenblick's work in various districts — including this one — are consistent with broad library reviews that flag books for content that falls outside a narrow definition of appropriate.

A school district that removes Zen and the Art of Faking It from its shelves is a school district that has decided a funny novel about a kid learning to be more honest with himself is not appropriate for its students. That seems like the wrong call.