NEW BOY
Tracy Chevalier (Vintage, £8.99)
Osei Kokote is the son of a Ghanaian diplomat, and has just arrived at his fourth school in six years. He’s also the only black boy in the suburban Washington DC school. The difficult first day is made easier by Osei becoming friends with Dee, the most popular girl in the school. But one of their fellow 11-year-olds, Ian, can’t stand to see this inter-racial friendship blossom and sets out to destroy it. One of Vintage’s ongoing reimaginings of Shakespeare, New Boy riffs off Othello, setting it on a single day in the 1970s and making Ian the Iago of the piece. It doesn’t settle as well into its new form as some of the previous Shakespeare-inspired books in the series have. Chevalier conveys well the plight of being an outsider, but the children often speak and rationalise like adults, which can be distracting. Maybe the themes of Othello are too heavy a burden for such young characters.
IF ONLY THEY DIDN’T SPEAK ENGLISH
Jon Sopel (BBC, £9.99)
As the BBC’s North America Editor, Jon Sopel thought he knew the United States. Until the 2016 Presidential campaign, that is, when the USA began to feel new and strange to him. One major problem Sopel feels that the British have with Americans is that our shared language makes them seem more like us than they actually are. If the USA spoke Japanese or Urdu, it would be easier for us to grasp that America has been shaped by its own unique history and accept the vast differences. He tries to get his head around it in chapters with titles like “Anger”, “Race”, “God”, “Guns” and “Chaos”, but whatever the subject all roads lead back to Trump eventually. Sopel is reasonably engaging and informative, but there’s little here that an afternoon’s Googling wouldn’t cover in greater depth, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that there’s a funnier and more penetrating book inside it trying to break out.
CHEMISTRY
Weike Wang (Text Publishing, £8.99)
The unnamed narrator of this novel is a Chemistry post-grad whose boyfriend has just proposed. He’s confident she’ll accept, but something is making her hesitate. While her boyfriend sails a smooth, straight path through life, she is more “like a gas particle moving around in space”. Under constant pressure from her hard-working Chinese parents to achieve excellence at all times, she feels inadequate, suspects she’s lost her passion for her subject and can see her standards slipping. Dramatically, she drops everything to spend the next couple of years applying her scientific brain to the subject of the human heart in a bid to understand what she really wants from life. Harvard graduate Wang, besides being scientifically literate, is quirky and wryly funny, sketching out every scene with only as many words as are needed; and the themes of indecision, underachievement and basing one’s self-worth on one’s career will strike a chord with many readers, not just the younger ones.
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