Yasmin Can Review

  Passing by Nella Larsen was a fantastic novella that I felt, captured the reality of ‘Passing’; the idea of a person, most often one of colour passing into (again, most often) white society as white. As anticipated from the title, this is the entire theme of the book, and Larsen writes beautiful characters that give the reader an emotive insight into the effect of race relations on everyday people in 1920s America. One thing that particularly struck me in this book was the amount of similarities it holds to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (TGG) . Many times while reading Passing I couldn’t help making connections to TGG. The main character meeting a rich, neurotic character, the class divide between the protagonist and the wealthier secondary character, the fact that both books are written from the view of the protagonist but is essentially about a different character whom they both admire and detest and most importantly the untimely but expected death of said char...

  Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin is a wonderful and emotional piece of modern fiction. The main character David is a complex and intriguing character, with which the reader is forced to both root for and criticise. I personally found Giovanni’s Room to be a beautiful addition to the well written genre that is homosexual love in the 1950s. I found that there was an abundance of deeply flawed characters that require the reader to love and hate in equal parts. The character of Jacques in particular prances about the pages in a manner very reminiscent of Wilde's Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray . Jacques’ vapid, hyper-sexual personality, and ingratiating attitude towards young men, encourages the reader to dislike him as much as the protagonist, David, does. Throughout the book, the reader is presented with a varied group of men and a couple of interesting female characters, whose outlook’s on life and appreciation for the ‘moment’ come across as very authent...

BOOK REVIEW  The White Boy Shuffle By Paul Beatty  The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty is one of the most invigorating and side-splitting pieces of fiction I have read. Following the hilarious and often times confusing life of a black teenage boy in California, Beatty expresses how growing up can be both confusing but also fascinating. The characters in this novel come to life on the very page, with complex personal histories and intriguing world views. The book is brimming with witty teenage slang entwined with intense philosophical concepts. I had had this book on ‘The Amazon List’ l ist, you know the one I’m talking about. The one you save things to and just entirely forget about? That one. I had saved TWBS (The White Boy Shuffle) to my reading list for a good three years before I purchased it and what actually prompted me to buy it was seeing another piece by Beatty in Waterstones. And I felt that I couldn’t, with good conscience, buy this new book without first havi...