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A review by adubrow
Tyrell by Coe Booth
5.0
With his father in jail and his mother’s welfare fraud living them homeless, fifteen year-old Tyrell drops out of school and struggles to find a way to keep his brother away from Children Services. The only good things in his life are Novisha who is a virgin going to the private Catholic school and his friends from the Projects who offer to help him, but are all engaged in illegal, dangerous activities. How is he going to keep his family from having to spend the rest of the winter in a roach-infested hotel waiting for room in a shelter to open up?
The unique style of the first person narrative took some getting used to, but this was an intensely real and sad novel. Tyrell’s life is so hard and so complicated that it really just made me think and I’m still sort of processing this brief glimpse into his life. It’s not really a coming of age book, because Tyrell’s had to be old for quite awhile now. His mother can hardly function, his father wasn’t the best role model but at least he was actively helping him, Troy, his brother is very bright but placed in Special Ed classes so their mother gets paychecks, and he begins to learn that his girlfriend might not be as perfect or sweet as she seems.
Then there’s Jasmine, a girl abandoned by the sister who raised her and used by nearly every man she meets outside of Tyrell who spends virtually every night beside her and a lot of other characters all struggling and all compromising some aspect of themselves to make ends meet. But through out the book Tyrell is beginning to find his own way and his own path in spite of some small compromises. This is another one of those books where I long to know what happened next and what sort of man he became. That said, this book has made a favorable and lasting impression on me.
The unique style of the first person narrative took some getting used to, but this was an intensely real and sad novel. Tyrell’s life is so hard and so complicated that it really just made me think and I’m still sort of processing this brief glimpse into his life. It’s not really a coming of age book, because Tyrell’s had to be old for quite awhile now. His mother can hardly function, his father wasn’t the best role model but at least he was actively helping him, Troy, his brother is very bright but placed in Special Ed classes so their mother gets paychecks, and he begins to learn that his girlfriend might not be as perfect or sweet as she seems.
Then there’s Jasmine, a girl abandoned by the sister who raised her and used by nearly every man she meets outside of Tyrell who spends virtually every night beside her and a lot of other characters all struggling and all compromising some aspect of themselves to make ends meet. But through out the book Tyrell is beginning to find his own way and his own path in spite of some small compromises. This is another one of those books where I long to know what happened next and what sort of man he became. That said, this book has made a favorable and lasting impression on me.