Free Burning

October 2, 2006
Tommie Simms is going down the ladder faster than he went up in Ojikutu's second novel (after 47th Street Black). Pushed into college by his addict mother, Tommie finds success working at an insurance company. Living in Chicago's Four Corners neighborhood with wife Tarsha and their baby girl, post-9/11 layoffs hit and Tommie scrambles to find employment. He begins selling marijuana for his cousin Remi and, after his arrest by a corrupt white cop named Weidmann, Tommie arranges a meeting between Remi and Weidmann, who wants in on Remi's action. This infuriates Remi's partner and half brother, Westside Jack. Jack pressures Tommie into helping him set up Weidmann by secretly filming him having sex with an underage girl. Getting deeper into the Chicago underworld, Tommie struggles to find his place-does he belong in the working week or on the streets? Tommie's narration merges urban cynicism with a densely crosshatched, riffing style reminiscent of Leon Forrest. Tommie is a character mentally stuck between two worlds, and his stasis eventually infects the energy of the story, which doesn't resolve so much as wind down.

September 1, 2006
Set on Chicago's South Side, this is the story of Tommie Simms, a college-educated black man with a middle-class job in the insurance industry and a wife and young child. Laid off after 9/11, Tommie turns to his cousin, Remi, a dealer, to make ends meet. He is quickly drawn into the Chicago underworld, selling drugs to pay the bills and getting dangerously entangled with both gang members and a corrupt police officer. Ojikutu's harsh and often violent depiction of the street life, where everyone has developed his or her own hustle in order to get by, is riveting. If the book has a problem, it's with the portrayal of Tommie. The reader never really understands what's behind self-described -square - Tommie's rapid fall from middle-class provider to gangsta wannabe and is left to wonder whether he is ultimately driven more by necessity or a destructive streak in his character. Still, this doesn't diminish the power or raw immediacy of the novel. Recommended for larger public libraries." -Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2006
Ojikutu's award-winning debut, " 47th Street Black " (2003), set in African American Chicago during the 1960s, portrays a promising high-school athlete turned gangster. In his second psychologically intense novel of the cruel paradoxes of life in a poor black Chicago neighborhood, Ojikutu hones his gifts for taut drama, bitter irony, and the rapid-fire trading of insults that passes for conversation among men struggling to survive in a world dead-set against them. Tommie, married with a baby daughter, has finally broken free from the poverty that grips his South Side neighborhood. Then he loses his job with a downtown insurance firm in the wake of 9/11. Soon he's as desperate as the guys who mock him for being a college grad and turns to selling weed for his cousin Remi only to run afoul of a rogue cop and rival dealers. Ojikutu writes with fierce precision and strategic nuance, shaping this timeless tale of a good man trapped in hell into a blazing indictment of the multiplying injustices and hunkered-down hopelessness of this particular juncture of terror and greed. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)