Review by Booklist Review
Bekono's lyrical debut is an exploration of the internal and external conflicts that come with being a young Black girl in the Netherlands. Salomé Atabong is the daughter of a Dutch mother and a Cameroonian father. She has always struggled to fit into her small community, but the divide is further highlighted when a group of asylum seekers is placed in local housing and the subtle racist acts she has accepted throughout her life escalate. At 16, she is convicted of a violent crime and sentenced to six months in a rehabilitation center for young women, but her rehabilitation is dependent on working with a racist psychologist. Bekono's novel is perfect for readers who value in-depth characterization. Salomé struggles with the quirks of teenagehood, a troubled home life, and the politics of navigating a world where underlying racist views are treated as normal and acceptable. In her complex and intricate first novel, Bekono does a fantastic job of exploring the internal conflict of wanting to fit in while also hoping to hold society to account.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A Cameroonian Dutch teen copes with pervasive racism and endures a stint in juvenile detention in Bekono's arresting debut. Salomé Atabong enters the rehabilitation center after committing a for-now-unspecified violent act. She worries that her Cameroonian father will succumb to his cancer before she's released in six months or that her headstrong sister will manage to flee their bigoted village in the Netherlands. At the facility, her simmering anger is agitated by having to work with a counselor who became infamous on a reality TV show for making racist comments. She spends the time mostly avoiding the others in her unit, reading the books her Dutch mom brings her, and combing through memories of her life before. Salomé's sharp, voice-driven narration captures the tedium and frustrations of her sentence as well as the depth of her adolescent angst. The slow revelation of Salomé's crime maintains tension throughout. The final act, which chronicles her release, interweaves her feelings, thoughts, and memories from before and during her incarceration to skillfully portray the difficulty of returning to life on the outside. This one's hard to put down. Agent: Lisette Verhagen, PFD Literary. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A tightly wound, forcefully lyrical debut novel by an award-winning Dutch poet. Sixteen-year-old Salomé Atabong has put herself in a vexing corner. The daughter of a Cameroonian father and a Dutch mother, she's serving a six-month sentence in a juvenile detention center (nicknamed "the Donut") for a violent crime whose particulars are gradually disclosed. Whatever she's done, Salomé shows no remorse for it, which exasperates not only her parents, but also the Donut staff, particularly Frits van Gestel, a white therapist who became notorious for making a condescending remark about "primitive life here in Africa" while appearing on TV. As far as Salomé is concerned, this makes Frits unworthy of her respect. "I know full well I'm not well," she says, but she's "not going to be helped by some fucking racist." Frits nonetheless keeps trying to break through Salomé's belligerence, which also rubs some of the other inmates the wrong way. Her refusal to even acknowledge the act that got her locked up parallels the novel's insistence on withholding specifics of that act. But the book does weave in pertinent details about Salomé's family, including her father, mother, sister, and aunt. Through her often-tumultuous day-to-day life at the Donut, her memories of family visits to Africa, and her coming to grips with her actions and their consequences, Salomé finds herself slowly, if grudgingly, approaching the basis of her constant anger. The whole novel comes across like a clenched fist resisting every impulse to open up, and one wonders if this unrelenting intensity might work against the possibility of its becoming one of those life-transforming novels about alienated youth in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye. But no matter how tense things get, you somehow stay with Salomé's pursuit of her goal: to locate "the Salomé who's made off with all my luck, and find a way to get to her." A psychological mystery whose solution resides in self-discovery. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
