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4.03 AVERAGE
4.03 AVERAGE
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Beautifully crafted and concise. Hurts the heart, though. All too relevant, then and now.
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
There is a lyrical beauty that undercuts the horror that you know is lingering within the world that David Chariandy writes. Set in Scarborough, a city in the Greater Toronto Area, Chariandy delves into the childhood and lives of two brothers growing up in a world where the deck seems stacked against them and their mother who wants nothing by the best for them.
It was heartbreaking, but in a quiet and understated way. There were times when I coudl feel the grief as it were palpable and other times it felt further away, like a wound that time was trying to heal. It's not the easiest read, but I loved it and I loved that it's so far from what's been considered (and mocked) as Canadian fiction.
It focuses on a side of Canada that we rarely see and that we tell ourselves doesn't exist. We look at the US and go well, we're not that bad as if that makes it any better. Brother, among so many other things, is a mirror reflecting parts of the world back to us that people may not want to examine more deeply.
It was heartbreaking, but in a quiet and understated way. There were times when I coudl feel the grief as it were palpable and other times it felt further away, like a wound that time was trying to heal. It's not the easiest read, but I loved it and I loved that it's so far from what's been considered (and mocked) as Canadian fiction.
It focuses on a side of Canada that we rarely see and that we tell ourselves doesn't exist. We look at the US and go well, we're not that bad as if that makes it any better. Brother, among so many other things, is a mirror reflecting parts of the world back to us that people may not want to examine more deeply.
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
this is the best example of dual timelines ive ever read. they flow seamlessly between past and present, but we always know where we are in the timeline. this book is harrowing but also a beautiful exploration of brotherhood and masculinity. loved this!
I love when I try a new writer, love them, and know I have more of their writing to look forward to! David Chariandy is such a writer! Brother is emotionally charged and politically relevant in under 200 pages. Not a word wasted. The setting of 1980’s Scarborough, Ontario is a character itself in this coming of age novel of brothers Francis and Michael, sons of their Trinidadian immigrant single mother. “Sometimes, explained my aunt, she had been jealous of her older sister, and the perfect life she alone had found by going away. Mother stayed quiet. She did not say that our father had left us years before. She did not admit that she had not had the time or money to complete her studies to become a nurse. She did not hint at the debt or struggle or the aches she often felt”.
A tragic and powerful coming-of-age story of two boys, sons of Trinidadian immigrants growing up in Scarborough.
The story jumps back and forth between the 80s and 10 years in the future after a tragedy.
Even though I'm a white woman and I grew up in Northern Ontario, I'm a child of the 70s and 80s so I could relate to some of the descriptions in the book such as the candy at the corner store, the tv shows and the music.
I could feel the pain and the angst of the characters and how the colour of their skin made them targets.
I liked how the book showed the universal character of music and how it can unite people.
This was a great little book and I look forward to reading the author's other works.
The story jumps back and forth between the 80s and 10 years in the future after a tragedy.
Even though I'm a white woman and I grew up in Northern Ontario, I'm a child of the 70s and 80s so I could relate to some of the descriptions in the book such as the candy at the corner store, the tv shows and the music.
I could feel the pain and the angst of the characters and how the colour of their skin made them targets.
I liked how the book showed the universal character of music and how it can unite people.
This was a great little book and I look forward to reading the author's other works.
I liked reading this for being Canadian, placed in the far-from-mythic setting of Scarborough, complete with constant night-traffic that sends up tides of slush from the highway. It's a timely book and a touching one, and Chariandy captures an atmosphere of doom and beauty at the same time. The relationship between the brothers, the relationship they have with their mother, read very real. It is both a short book and a long one, well-written and tight, but with shifts in time that drag the book out. In the beginning you know what will happen at the end, which curtails some suspense, but of course the ending is not designed to shock. That would risk being counter-intuitive to the message, which is in part how this violence against particular communities and people is not isolated, not shocking, but a persistent fact. Chariandy's different time-shifted set pieces underscore this, the anecdotes carefully constructed to display the emotional, intellectual, and social atmosphere that affects thought and action throughout.