An action-packed, heartbreaking, and eye-opening debut from a great new talent.
A Nigerian boy struggles to survive in a violent, disintegrating world.
Like the most famous coming-of-age-in-hell story of all, Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, Nigerian lawyer and political commentator John’s debut novel makes an old nightmare new by placing a bright, articulate, curious, and endearing young narrator in the midst of it. Dantala Ahmad—his name means “born on a Tuesday”—struggles to learn how the world works, to understand friendship, love, and sex, and to pursue his drive for knowledge and self-expression while living in the thick of wholesale mayhem and death. (Though this is a novel, the acknowledgments explain that the character was inspired by a real person “who will probably never read this book.”) Dantala is an almajiri—an Arabic word used in Nigeria for a child who has left his home to study Islam—who gives an account of his life from 2003 to 2010. The opening finds him smoking “wee-wee” with a gang of street kids under a tree—he's been hanging out with them for about two years, since he finished his Quranic training and didn’t have the fare for the bus home to his village. Paid to cause trouble during an election, some of the boys are murdered; others scatter. Dantala ends up at a mosque run by a kind, peace-loving imam named Sheikh Jamal. Sheikh recognizes Dantala’s intelligence and good nature and makes him a key assistant, managing funds, singing the call to prayer, studying computer skills and English. Some of the most touching, Anne Frank–like portions of the novel are excerpts of a notebook in which Dantala meditates on new vocabulary words like PATRON, GIBBERISH, OBSESS, and WHY, including his thoughts on everything from the bizarre confusions of Islamic sectarianism to his emerging sexuality and burning crush on Sheikh’s daughter. As further political conflict erupts, Dantala must battle insanity, ignorance, and brutality in his attempt to find a place in the world.
An action-packed, heartbreaking, and eye-opening debut from a great new talent.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2482-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
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SEEN & HEARD
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