Trigger warnings: Gang violence, racism,
Synopsis: In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn’t dangerous or brilliant—he’s an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home.
Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights–era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America.
Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don’t Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.
Review: Everywhere You Don't Belong is an interesting story about a kid named Claude as he wrestles with not feeling "at home" anywhere. I liked Claude a lot. He doesn't try to be special. He just wants to survive his youth. We get to see glimpses of what happened to old classmates of his, which made me want him to survive even more. It takes a little while to get to know Claude because his childhood moves rather quickly through the book until he hits middle school. We get a real idea of who Claude is when the Redbelters come into the picture and tear up his neighborhood.
I liked that Claude takes some time to reflect on the people and environment around him, and he tries to decide whether this is something he wants to continue to be a part of. I will say that I was hoping for something a little different from this book. At the start, we see people continually leave Claude's life, so I wanted this to be a story about Claude finding a place to be where people don't constantly leave him. I'm not a very optimistic person, but I really wanted Claude to find this place. That isn't what I got out of Everywhere You Don't Belong, but it does hit some similar themes like realizing what's important to you. And letting yourself love.
Interesting debut with a lot of heart.
4 howls
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