Refugee boy, Benjamin Zephaniah, 3/50
Zephaniah famously turned down the Queen’s offer of an OBE due to his rejection of the concept and history of that Empire (interview, and rejection poem, here.) He’s better known as a poet, but he's also written at least four children’s books.
Refugee Boy is about Alem Kelo, a boy with an Ethiopian father and an Eritrean mother. The war between the two means that his family is safe in neither place, and instead his father takes him to the UK, where they have friends there working for peace - and leaves him. Alem is placed initially in a children’s home, and then with a foster family, as his application for refugee status progresses through the British legal system.
The beginning of this is excellent. Unfortunately, although I enjoyed the rest, it never quite matched up to the blunt clarity of the opening; there’s a tendency for things to be told rather than shown, and the characters are also all slightly flat - not necessarily stereotyped, but underdeveloped. The narrative tends to duck out of Alem’s point of view when major emotional events happen, which distanced me from him and defused the impact; it works in the opening, and in the final newspaper article, but in the main body of the text I just needed more connection, particularly in moments such as when Alem’s reading the letter his father has left him after abandoning him in a hotel. The final chapter is Alem in first person, defining himself, and I wish more of the book had been written that way.
Refugee Boy is about Alem Kelo, a boy with an Ethiopian father and an Eritrean mother. The war between the two means that his family is safe in neither place, and instead his father takes him to the UK, where they have friends there working for peace - and leaves him. Alem is placed initially in a children’s home, and then with a foster family, as his application for refugee status progresses through the British legal system.
The beginning of this is excellent. Unfortunately, although I enjoyed the rest, it never quite matched up to the blunt clarity of the opening; there’s a tendency for things to be told rather than shown, and the characters are also all slightly flat - not necessarily stereotyped, but underdeveloped. The narrative tends to duck out of Alem’s point of view when major emotional events happen, which distanced me from him and defused the impact; it works in the opening, and in the final newspaper article, but in the main body of the text I just needed more connection, particularly in moments such as when Alem’s reading the letter his father has left him after abandoning him in a hotel. The final chapter is Alem in first person, defining himself, and I wish more of the book had been written that way.