Everywhere You Don't Belong by Gabriel Bump book review

 

Everywhere You Don't Belong by Gabriel Bump book review 

Everywhere you don't belong by gabriel bump this is a fictional book and it's a coming-of-age story following a black man named claude who is growing up on the south side of chicago claude is kind of like this awkward kid awkward teenager 

Who is dealing with a lot of stuff he is dealing with some grief and abandonment issues because his parents left him in the care of his grandmother 

He's also just like very uncomfortable and has a lot of anxiety he doesn't like know how to interact with other people basically there's a lot of like really awkward 

But kind of funny like dialogue scenes that take place in here where he just is like either brutally honest or he just like doesn't talk at all and people like don't know what to really do with him 

He's really introverted and nerdy and into books and he wants to study journalism and so part of it is just sort of like what you would consider a slightly standard coming-of-age story 

But it also is about growing up on the south side of chicago where there is a significant amount of violence and trauma as well as underfunded schools and just underfunded communities in general and a lack of support in that area 

There are discussions in here about gangs and gang life in terms of like what it's like growing up and seeing a lot of your friends and classmates fall into that life and sort of the reasons behind that 

It's not, all the same, it talks about race and racism and the race in a race riot takes place and sort of the impacts that has on this individual family and on this specific neighborhood 

There's always like i feel like a discussion in terms of when these riots break out on sort of the city as a larger whole but you don't really often see the story of like the specific neighborhood 

Where this breaks out and sort of the consequences of that effect and also the aftermath of what those sorts of riots and damages sort of due to these people and their lives 

You know people die and get hurt and stuff like that and you hear about it when the event has occurred but you don't really see the aftermath of those events 

This book sort of explores that too the book is broken up into two parts the first part is claude's life growing up through high school and the second part is about when he decides to go to missouri for college 

So you see claude struggling with leaving chicago and being in a completely different sort of town like he goes to mizu the university of missouri because it's a really great journalism school but it's in this like small town in missouri 

So obviously that life is extremely extremely different so he talks about his experience there and joining the newspaper and he continues to be like this socially awkward person completely unsure of like what 

He's doing and you follow life from there this book is extremely slim and so it does like cover a lot of these topics from a sort of higher level 

But i feel like because you're following cloud who lives in these neighborhoods it also feels very authentic and genuine to what that life is like gabriel bump himself grew up in the south side of chicago 

So the stories feel very authentic for lack of a better term and so like the fact that it doesn't do any sort of like sociological analysis on any of this feels really accurate because when you're that age and you're living that life 

You don't have that sort of larger perspective or point of view or anything like that but there are points in here where claude provides these like really poignant descriptions of like why people are making the choices that they make or you know sort of understanding 

Why you want to leave or why you want to stay or anything along those lines i feel like it perfectly captures this very singular experience in this very slim book in a very like beautiful way 

This book is also like kind of funny like i have a hard time with funny books because like i feel like they're very hit or miss 

So i wouldn't say this is like laugh out loud funny but there are parts in here that are very just like comedic in terms of the observations like when i was reading this book it reminded me a little bit of the tv show atlanta and the way that some of the things that occur in there are like funny 

But they're not like over-the-top funny like it still feels very true and authentic to what that specific part of the atlanta experience is like and i feel like this book kind of captures something very similar to some of the exchanges in here and some of the conversations is just like very ridiculous 

There's a lot of like characters like true characters um in this book they feel very like unique and unto themselves but at the same time like it feels like these people really do exist 

So yeah i feel like this is a book that's like simultaneously really hard to explain because it feels so unique and unto itself and so i feel like going into this expecting anything really is going to set you up for failure because i feel like there's no way to really expect what this book is and it's beautiful because like how rare is it that you actually 

Get to experience something like that especially if you are like me and you read a significant number of books every year like it's very rare to be surprised by a book and i would say like this book was surprising in the sense that like it was nothing like 

What i thought it was going to be but also like i feel like i haven't really read that many books that are quite like this at the same time so yeah i really enjoyed this book i would say it's like three and a half four-star rating in terms of like goodreads rating and stuff like that 

But i really appreciated it because it's like a really great unique take on the coming of age story um obviously as someone who has grown up in the chicagoland area 

I'm biased at for any book that takes place in chicago the sort of like thing that like docks it down in terms of being a true like four-star or four star plus book is like things get a little out of hand towards the end of the book 

I obviously can't get into spoilers as regard to it but the sticks get raised a significant amount at the end of the book in a way that felt kind of unrealistic 

But again it also kind of felt like a tv show that was like sort of amping things up over the course of a season and then you know went wild a little bit at the end and so this book kind of does that as well 

But i don't think it amped it up in a sort of realistic way or not realistic but sort of like a gradual enough way like it sort of feels like this book was at a four in terms of like tension and stuff like that and then all of a sudden it's at like an eight.

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