Take a photo of a barcode or cover
Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s novel The Lebs is a hard-hitting look at what it is like to grow up in Australia as the Muslim son of Lebanese immigrants.
Set in an all-boys school in Sydney in the late 1990s, it’s a potent mix of profanity, sex, lust, religion, racism, misogyny and hyper-masculinity.
It’s not an easy book to like. There are many confronting scenes and the language doesn’t pull its punches. Women are largely seen as sexual objects and there’s a dark undercurrent of racism running underneath it.
But this feels like an authentic world, a world in which teenage boys are full of bravado and hormones, where being different is to become an outcast, where bullying, peer pressure and tribal violence is the code by which everyone lives.
To read the rest of my review, please visit my blog.
Set in an all-boys school in Sydney in the late 1990s, it’s a potent mix of profanity, sex, lust, religion, racism, misogyny and hyper-masculinity.
It’s not an easy book to like. There are many confronting scenes and the language doesn’t pull its punches. Women are largely seen as sexual objects and there’s a dark undercurrent of racism running underneath it.
But this feels like an authentic world, a world in which teenage boys are full of bravado and hormones, where being different is to become an outcast, where bullying, peer pressure and tribal violence is the code by which everyone lives.
To read the rest of my review, please visit my blog.