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A review by edgwareviabank
Everywhere You Don't Belong by Gabriel Bump
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? Yes
3.5
I started and abandoned my review at least three times now. I'm not sure I can do Everywhere You Don't Belong justice. One thing's for sure: the endorsement on the back cover, claiming you won't realise this book has hypnotised you until the very end, is true - and I'm finally realising it weeks after reading the final chapter.
I'll start from what I know: plot and character.
The South Shore section presents Claude and his chosen family with a mix of tenderness and sorrow that makes it incredibly easier to share the love the characters feel for each other, and the pain they can't help each other avoid. Even Janice, who looked to me like the weak link in the cast (not as thoroughly characterized, sometimes more of a vehicle for Claude to project emotions on), ends up feeling like family, because of the attachment Claude, Grandma and Paul feel for her. It's impossible to care about any one of these characters without wanting the others to also find unconditional love, a sense of belonging, a way of living that feels safe and far less precarious. A particularly powerful choice Bump made was to write Claude as an average boy, dealing with change and forces bigger than him without any desire to become the hero or channel destruction. He is confused, sometimes scared, often unsure of himself. He may be depressed. His grandmother's efforts to ignite a spark in him mostly fall flat. Sometimes, we want to read about leaders who rise the occasion, or dangerous, morally compromised characters; sometimes, we need to be reminded that there are all sorts of people in between, paralysed by danger and doubt and just looking for something to hang on to.
The Missouri chapters are more pointedly plot-driven; action replaces some of the introspection, and the situation evolves with a speed that feels unnatural. Between the second-to-last chapter and the very end, there's a lot about Claude and Janice's life that feels unsaid, and as a reader who grew so fond of them, I really could have done with reading more. But the book's main themes are all there, resolved in ways that may or may not feel satisfactory, and definitely feel true to life. You may get to the end and remember how constant a thread abandonment was in Claude's early life: who is abandoning who, now? Is leaving always as gratuitous and unnecessary as it looks to the ones who stay? Or you may stop and think about the helpers Claude and Janice meet along the way: Juna and her father, outwardly so different from Grandma and Paul, but ultimately similar in their acts of resistance.
With so much racism and police brutality in the news, it's impossible to not find Everywhere You Don't Belong spot-on. The main characters are among those who suffer the most from the endless, institutionalized violence and constant micro-aggressions. To a reader like me, who hasn't lived this on as large a scale as Claude and his loved ones, the book underscores just how inadequate the response is from the groups that are on the side of privilege. Whether it's well-meaning (?) university journal editors that see a black student and place the burden of educating others on their shoulders, or college town boys that fly Confederate flags from their cars the way others blast loud music on the way to a party, any behaviour that ultimately excludes and threatens is indefensible. Yet, sometimes, it's all we see. The book doesn't say "do better" out loud: it's too preoccupied, legitimately preoccupied, with survival. The reader gets to share in the fear and sense of impending doom, as if the book's South Shore streets and Missouri motel parking lot were right outside their front door. And just because we don't see them, day to day, it doesn't mean that the places we live and breathe are any different or any safer.
I'll start from what I know: plot and character.
The South Shore section presents Claude and his chosen family with a mix of tenderness and sorrow that makes it incredibly easier to share the love the characters feel for each other, and the pain they can't help each other avoid. Even Janice, who looked to me like the weak link in the cast (not as thoroughly characterized, sometimes more of a vehicle for Claude to project emotions on), ends up feeling like family, because of the attachment Claude, Grandma and Paul feel for her. It's impossible to care about any one of these characters without wanting the others to also find unconditional love, a sense of belonging, a way of living that feels safe and far less precarious. A particularly powerful choice Bump made was to write Claude as an average boy, dealing with change and forces bigger than him without any desire to become the hero or channel destruction. He is confused, sometimes scared, often unsure of himself. He may be depressed. His grandmother's efforts to ignite a spark in him mostly fall flat. Sometimes, we want to read about leaders who rise the occasion, or dangerous, morally compromised characters; sometimes, we need to be reminded that there are all sorts of people in between, paralysed by danger and doubt and just looking for something to hang on to.
The Missouri chapters are more pointedly plot-driven; action replaces some of the introspection, and the situation evolves with a speed that feels unnatural. Between the second-to-last chapter and the very end, there's a lot about Claude and Janice's life that feels unsaid, and as a reader who grew so fond of them, I really could have done with reading more. But the book's main themes are all there, resolved in ways that may or may not feel satisfactory, and definitely feel true to life. You may get to the end and remember how constant a thread abandonment was in Claude's early life: who is abandoning who, now? Is leaving always as gratuitous and unnecessary as it looks to the ones who stay? Or you may stop and think about the helpers Claude and Janice meet along the way: Juna and her father, outwardly so different from Grandma and Paul, but ultimately similar in their acts of resistance.
With so much racism and police brutality in the news, it's impossible to not find Everywhere You Don't Belong spot-on. The main characters are among those who suffer the most from the endless, institutionalized violence and constant micro-aggressions. To a reader like me, who hasn't lived this on as large a scale as Claude and his loved ones, the book underscores just how inadequate the response is from the groups that are on the side of privilege. Whether it's well-meaning (?) university journal editors that see a black student and place the burden of educating others on their shoulders, or college town boys that fly Confederate flags from their cars the way others blast loud music on the way to a party, any behaviour that ultimately excludes and threatens is indefensible. Yet, sometimes, it's all we see. The book doesn't say "do better" out loud: it's too preoccupied, legitimately preoccupied, with survival. The reader gets to share in the fear and sense of impending doom, as if the book's South Shore streets and Missouri motel parking lot were right outside their front door. And just because we don't see them, day to day, it doesn't mean that the places we live and breathe are any different or any safer.