Aug 9

Aug 9 Everywhere You Don't Belong

Author: Gabriel Bump
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn’t dangerous or brilliant — he’s an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home.

Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights–era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America.

Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don’t Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.

TL;DR Review

Everywhere You Don’t Belong was a moving, fast-paced, poignant coming-of-age story about a young Black man from Chicago.

For you if: You are looking for a strong #OwnVoices example of commercial literary fiction.

Full Review

“And they’ve said, ‘Martin Luther King was a puppet.’ And these people who’ve said Martin Luther King was a puppet have also said, ‘Brother Malcolm got it right: any means necessary.’ And both those brothers got shot. And both those brothers wanted freedom. And the Civil Rights Act was political. And black America still isn’t free. And black men are still dying. And black women are still dying. And there’s anger, yes, there’s anger. And that anger has to go away when you go to work or go to school or ride the bus or go to the grocery store or go to a movie downtown. And that anger has to go away—if it doesn’t, how do you survive?”

First of all, the biggest of thanks to the folks at Page 1 Books, who sent this to me as part of my monthly subscription. As you might expect when booksellers scour your Goodreads and Instagram to hand-pick a book for you, it was a perfect fit, and so poignant at this moment especially.

Everywhere You Don’t Belong is about a young boy named Claude. Left by his parents, he was raised by his grandmother in South Shore, Chicago. He’s a bit of a misfit, never quite feeling at home in his own skin or among his peers — that is, until he meets Janice, first just a classmate but then a housemate once a (fictional) deadly days-long clash between a local gang and the police in their neighborhood destroys her home. Claude looks to college to pull him out of the place he feels stuck in, but home — and those who know your deepest self — have a way of finding you.

I read this book in one sitting. I know “propulsive” is one of those over-used adjectives in book reviews, but it really does fit here. Short sentences, short paragraphs, short scenes set you flying through the pages, and your heart can barely keep up.

The ending was something I never could have anticipated. It’s also really reminded me, in the end, that this book is truly fiction, a story; whereas the first half felt like it could have been historical fiction about true events (although the South Shore riots are, in fact, fictional). But I still think that it felt like a good ending, one that was simultaneously sad and hopeful.

I think readers of commercial literary fiction — especially those seeking more #OwnVoices stories — will devour this one.