99 NAMES

In Jackson’s debut YA novel, a teenage immigrant to Australia seeks his path against a chaotic backdrop of politics and religion.

Like most 16-year-olds, the kid (who remains unnamed in the text)is in a period of transition. He was born in southern Lebanon, and his Christian family moved to Sydney in 2006 to escape the war. The loss of the family’s land still haunts his father, but the kid and his older brother, Basim—who recently dropped out of high school to work in a mechanic shop—are more interested in hip-hop, street racing, and, increasingly, Friday night prayers at the local mosque (the last of which they keep secret from their father). While walking home from the mosque one night, the kid encounters Issi, an Australian-born graffiti artist his same age. The two begin meeting up every day of the summer break, and Issi encourages the kid to pursue his own artistic inclinations. “It gives you a good feeling,” she tells him. “To create something. Something meaningful. Even if it’s just for yourself.” Their casual friendship soon blossoms into something more, but their relationship runs up against the expectations of their respective families and is threatened by the complicated manner in which religion, politics, and youthful disillusionment have come to manifest in the kid’s immigrant community. With Issi’s help, the kid may finally find the identity he’s long searched for—but he will lose some things in the process. Jackson’s ornate prose casts whatever it touches in a mythic light. Here, the author describes a gang of nativist Australians’ antagonistic response to the muezzin’s call to prayer: “It was a rallying cry for those whose afternoons had already begun to take the turn towards the particular and particularly pernicious styles of disappointment…to take up the cudgels in pharisaic solidarity with other true blue patriots and strike out at a common enemy, a despised intruder.” As Jackson fills out the surprisingly large cast of characters making up the kid’s world, this initially quiet novel takes on an increasingly wide societal scope.

A deftly told and richly detailed novel about coming of age in a place you don’t quite belong.