Everywhere You Don't Belong

November 11, 2019
Bump’s astute and touching debut follows young Claude McKay Love, a black child learning to navigate contemporary Chicago’s South Side after his parents’ acrimonious split. Raised by his strong-willed, foul-mouthed Grandma and her best friend, a gay man named Paul, the duo are honest with Claude about his absent parents and needing to make his own way in life. As a teenager, Claude is advised by his grandma to stay far away from the Redbelters, a gang, telling him the members will never get further than the corner they’re standing on. As the Redbelters gain notoriety, Grandma attempts to organize their neighbors to stand up to them, but to no avail: the neighborhood erupts in a standoff between gangs and police, forever transformed by shootings, destruction, and terror. Along with Grandma and Paul, Claude and his close friend Janice try to rebuild their lives after the violence without falling victim to despair. Hoping to leave his broken hometown behind, Claude heads to Missouri for college, where he discovers there’s no way to outrun the past. Bump balances his heavy subject matter with a healthy dose of humor, but the highlight is Claude, a complex, fully developed protagonist who anchors everything. Readers will be moved in following his path to young adulthood.

There are all sorts of characters in this audiobook: Claude McKay Love, an African-American youth from Chicago who is finding his way to manhood; his fiery grandmother and her hapless, hilarious boyfriend; Claude's parents, who desert him; and his "sister" and life love, Janice. Narrator Korey Jackson's default voice is pretty deep, but he is equally adept at men and women. He varies both pitch and other qualities, including intensity and degrees of accent, to differentiate characters. This audiobook is not a smooth narrative. Claude's coming-of-age story is told in vignettes, and without the visual cues that print can give, they may seem a bit uneven. However, the characters are worth following, and Jackson's performance makes them more so. G.S. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine