A review by lepasseportlitteraire
Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

challenging emotional funny informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

5.0

I do not usually go for books written by famous people, they usually lack personality and style, and sometimes just lack content. This book, however, has all of it, and way more. 

✨ I have loved Trevor Noah as a stand-up comedian for a long time: not only he is funny, he also has extraordinary storytelling abilities, whenever I watched one of his shows, it was never only funny jokes: he would drag me into a story.

✨ In this autobiographical book, you can sense this ability of his since page one: you are in for a touching, personal story about growing up in South Africa during and right after apartheid, the difficulty of being in the middle (neither white nor black) and trying to find his ow place, a story about family and about a mother and son relationship. 

✨ The writing is simple and direct (just how I like it), but nonetheless loaded on emotions : happiness, joy, outrage, amusement, fear, confusion … I could not have hoped for anything more starting this book, and I can only hope that Trevor Noah not only keeps up with his comedian career, but I definitely hope he’ll write more, I feel he could write whatever he’d like and it would be a success. And not because he is famous, but because he is a great storyteller, on scene as well as on paper.