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A review by fallbetweenthepages
Everywhere You Don't Belong by Gabriel Bump
4.0
Thank you Netgalley for the chance to review the advance copy of Everywhere You Don't Belong. I’m excited to share with you all this thought provoking novel centering on a young man faced with the harsh reality of what it means to be a black in America while desperately searching for a place where he belongs.
At first I wasn’t sure if this was going to be my kind of read. I normal drift to the YA genre, but once I started reading, the more I wanted to know about Claude and his life. Nothing about this novel is predictable however there are several rough truths etched in that make you stop and think, “Why is it so difficult to move forward?”. For Claude, he wants nothing more than a normal life, to be free to live without the pressures of what lay beyond; riots, thinking about the parents who abandoned him, and the constant violence he is faced with everyday.
While I did want more descriptions of Claude’s surroundings, the author’s writing style presents a unique yet general tone of the characters who shift in and out of his life throughout the years: the girl he loved, the friends he's lost, and his parential guardians who do the best they can to mend the hole in his broken heart. I throughly enjoyed the novel, while heartbreaking and bluntly honest, Bump turns a coming of age story into a powerful message of the constant struggles the black community still faces today.
At first I wasn’t sure if this was going to be my kind of read. I normal drift to the YA genre, but once I started reading, the more I wanted to know about Claude and his life. Nothing about this novel is predictable however there are several rough truths etched in that make you stop and think, “Why is it so difficult to move forward?”. For Claude, he wants nothing more than a normal life, to be free to live without the pressures of what lay beyond; riots, thinking about the parents who abandoned him, and the constant violence he is faced with everyday.
While I did want more descriptions of Claude’s surroundings, the author’s writing style presents a unique yet general tone of the characters who shift in and out of his life throughout the years: the girl he loved, the friends he's lost, and his parential guardians who do the best they can to mend the hole in his broken heart. I throughly enjoyed the novel, while heartbreaking and bluntly honest, Bump turns a coming of age story into a powerful message of the constant struggles the black community still faces today.