A WALK THROUGH THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Boyd’s novel follows a young boy whose life is slowly overtaken by tragedy and poverty.

The narrative begins with the first of many traumatic moments as Timothy Valentine II, or “Junior,” relates his memories of his mother’s funeral, which occurred when he was 8 years old. (It was the same day he learned why his father stabbed her to death—he was angry that she tried to leave.) Junior moves in with his vivacious grandmother, who tries to keep him on a path to righteousness and responsibility, but a second tragedy leaves him in the care of his Aunt Claire. Junior and his only friend, a small cat named Ms. Kelly, move from the Virginia countryside to the inner city of Richmond, where he explores the world of Aunt Claire’s rough, impoverished neighborhood, which he sees as a maze of identical buildings and “lots of dead ends.” Beset by violent bullying and the aggressive indifference of his cousins, Junior’s sweet disposition soon melts away. He adopts the attitude of the neighborhood: “You had to hustle to eat.” Drugs and guns replace kittens and Bible verses in Junior’s world, but he remains friends with one good influence, a sweet young girl named Truly. But as Junior starts to lose himself completely to violence, more tragedy looms for them all on the horizon. Through Junior’s first-person narration, Boyd brings a sense of realistic restraint to each shocking event—readers feel how desensitized Junior becomes to the procession of horrors via his matter-of-fact reporting about deaths, fights, and drug abuse. The author strikes a delicate and fascinating balance between the mindset of the child enduring these situations and the older narrator reflecting on them. (“It didn’t dawn on me,” Junior muses while contemplating his acquiescence to peer pressure, “that I was thinking like an animal.”) The string of increasingly terrible events finally leads to a breaking point and a conclusion that feels too abrupt given the novel’s otherwise slow and methodical pacing, but along the way Boyd provides readers with plenty of touching, beautiful, and troubling observations about family, friendship, and grief.

An intense and intelligently crafted story about overcoming life’s most extreme trials.