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    Everywhere You Don't Belong
    Everywhere You Don't Belong
    Everywhere You Don't Belong
    Audiobook7 hours

    Everywhere You Don't Belong

    Written by Gabriel Bump

    Narrated by Korey Jackson

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    "This book is astonishing. You'll be smiling even as your heart is breaking, and you'll tip willingly into this world Bump offers you, because what appears again and again are spectacular beams of light also called love, also called hope, also called family. Gabriel Bump has established himself as a stunning talent to be reckoned with." -Maaza Mengiste, author of Beneath the Lion's Gaze In this powerful, edgy, and funny debut novel about making right and wrong choices, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable and lovable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude is a young black man in search of a place where he can fit; born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights-era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change. After a riot consumes his neighborhood, Claude decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new life and identity. But as he discovers, there's no escaping the people and places that made him. Written in a fierce and original voice attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don't Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 4, 2020
    ISBN9781980063742
    Everywhere You Don't Belong

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    Reviews for Everywhere You Don't Belong

    3.5/5

    84 ratings17 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The narrative style was distracting from what is a good coming of age tale. A lot of 'he said/she said', 'I yelled/she yelled/I yelled back'. I almost stopped listening by chapter 5
    • 4/5
      Good book! I like the author’s writing style. The main character, Claude, is a dear, sweet, uncomplicated fellow, earnest and sincere. You just can’t help loving him as he tries his best to navigate his way through a very upsetting, confusing, and unjust world.

      An incident occurs towards the end of the book which was so reminiscent of a short story I read a long time ago, titled “Red Underwear”, I can’t help wondering if it was written by the same author. At any rate, this is a good story which is definitely worth a listen....☺️ VERY good narration too, by the way.
    • 5/5
      Gabriel Bump dedicates his thought-provoking debut novel Everywhere You Don't Belong to his Grandma and young Black men like Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Travon Martin, among others. Set in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, teenage Claude lives with Grandma and her friend Paul. Grandma participated in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Paul is gay and unlucky in love. Grandma gets Claude into a Catholic school on the other side of the tracks, but Claude is bullied at school because he is "bad at sports, no jokes, no rich parents, no excellent homework to steal and copy."A few months into his tenure at Catholic school, his Grandma and the nuns had a disagreement about sexual abstinence (Grandma is against it), and Claude and Catholic school part ways. Grandma is quite a character, but she loves Claude.Basketball was everything in Chicago at this time- the Bulls had Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman, who were all on team that won multiple championships. Claude wasn't any good at basketball, but his best friend Jonah was a superstar. When Claude was badly beat up by Jonah's rival, Jonah's parents move him away, and Claude is left alone.The South Side was also home to the Redbelters, who Grandma says thinks they are Black Panthers, but they recruit kids to sell drugs for them. When Claude and his friends are caught in the middle of a deadly riot between cops and the Redbelters, the neighborhood is being torn apart live on the nightly news.Claude wants to escape and so he goes to college in Missouri to study journalism. His hopes of being his own person is hindered by his fellow students and teachers who once again want to define him by his race. When a young woman from home tracks him down, he has to decide where his future lies.Everywhere You Don't Belong is a worthy addition to the best coming-of-age novels, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to The Catcher in the Rye to more current ones like Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give. Bump creates a character in Claude who comes alive on the page. Good authors put us in the shoes and minds of their characters, and Bump does that with great empathy and a little humor (Grandma and Paul provide that). I highly recommend Everywhere You Don't Belong, and I'm not alone. The New York Times chose it as one of their 100 Notable Books of 2020.Thansk for Algonquin Books for putting me on Gabriel Bump's tour.
    • 3/5
      Claude is a black teen living with his grandmother on the South Side of Chicago and dealing with issues of race, gangs, poverty, and family dysfunction. The dark humor was an apt method of story telling, but the overall arch and development of the story left me wanting - perhaps why it's a YA and not adult novel?
    • 4/5
      Gabriel Bump has written a funny and complicated coming-of-age novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, that defies typical YA convention by focusing on character more than plot. In the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, Claude lives with his Grandma and the charmingly enigmatic Paul after both his parents leave when he is five. Claude’s introversion grows along with him as different friends come and go throughout his childhood. In the second half of the book, Claude leaves his makeshift family which now includes his once romantic interest, Janice, to go to college, but he doesn’t find the belonging he desires there either. As noted, the story is written with broad strokes that barely connect, but the characters and themes of race, inclusion and what makes a family really shine. I’ve seen Everywhere You Don’t Belong on YA lists, and I think it will appeal to strong readers who desire social justice books that really examine belonging and race with a dark sense of humor.
    • 4/5
      Claude McKay Love is a black teenager growing up on the south side of Chicago. His parents abandoned him early on and he has been raised by his fiery, activist grandmother. Claude is an emotional kid and is disheartened by the things he sees around him- his friends being gunned down by gangs or the police, riots against injustices and the bleak future that face most of the kids in his neighborhood. He decides to flee the city and enrolls in college in Iowa, aiming to become a journalist. He soon finds out that there is no safe oasis for a young black man. This is an impressive debut. There is a gritty edge to his writing style, but also an equally dark wit. And Claude was a terrific character to spend a couple of a hundred pages with.
    • 4/5
      Claude, the main character, is a typical teen despite his somewhat unusual upbringing in South Shore, Chicago (where Bump himself grew up). He struggles with abandonment issues (his parents left him to be raised by his grandmother, his friends keep moving to "better" neighborhoods). Only Janice stays, and Janice should have some abandonment issues of her own. She channels her issues into hared of the gang who instigated a riot.Despite his often feeling out of place (even with Janice's friends) and unwanted, he knows he is loved--like so many teenagers from all kinds of places and upbringings. Bump has created a character who is funny and somewhat irreverant, but also lost and unclear on how to accomplish his dream of getting out and doing "something".He heads to college in Missouri, to major in journalism. He has a weird roommate and doesn't much like working on the school paper, or the people he works with. Does he like his major? He doesn't know. When he and the other black staffer are assigned the "diversity project" he realizes this isn't going to work. He doesn't even understand what they want or what to do or how. And then Janice comes for a surprise visit. The story goes absurd and surreal from here, but I could not help rooting for these characters, and their chance to get back at the two groups they feel ruined their childhoods.
    • 4/5
      I worry readers are going to be expecting something from this book that is very different from what they receive, and this will only drag down the rating. Everywhere You Don't Belong is definitely a book very much about the issues of social justice and racism, but it is very much written in a clever, darkly comic manner. This is a novel for fans of David Foster Wallace and Adam Levin, particularly the latter. The same kind of quirky characters with endearing nicknames you'd find in The Instructions are here. The build up to a battle to end all battles (Infinite Jest's tennis war or The Instructions' Armageddon) is also here, but the payoff isn't quite as epic as either of those provided. Although I have a love-hate relationship with Infinite Jest, I thoroughly enjoyed The Instructions and I do think Everywhere You Don't Belong is an excellent companion piece.Given the length of Everywhere You Don't Belong (a fourth of the aforementioned tomes) and the popularity of the subject matter, I do think this book will fall into the hands of many readers who are unfamiliar with postmodernism. They may be looking for an entirely believable story, and when what they get isn't realism, nor is it something they can equate with an established genre, I think they may be too quick to dismiss it.But look at me, spending all my time talking about what other readers are potentially going to do... Here's what I think of this novel:I enjoyed much of this book. The opening chapters where we're introduced to Claude's life and his friends is stellar. I wish I'd been able to spend more time with [TK], and Jonah. The conversations that happened between Claude's grandmother and her friend Paul were so outlandishly entertaining. Many of these chapters felt more like short stories from the life of Claude, giving the reader an idea of different aspects of his life rather than a joined narrative. Eventually, the narrative becomes more cohesive. For me, the concluding chapters didn't carry the same heft as the first half of the book, but I was still pleased with them. There's just a sharpness to the wit and language of the first half that I think was missing in the end.Everywhere You Don't Belong comes out in February 2020. And if I haven't made it clear yet, I recommend this novel for fans of Adam Levin.
    • 3/5
      It took me a while to get the rhythm of Bump's fragmented storytelling. Claude Love is growing into manhood on the South Side of Chicago. He is curious about his parents, who left him with his grandmother, and after witnessing a riot, Claude is anxious to get away from Chicago. He goes to college in Missouri, but finds that he is not at home there either. Eventually he realizes that he can't find home by running away from the people he knows.
    • 4/5
      A very good debut novel. It tells the story of Claude, a sensitive boy being raised by his grandma in the Chicago hood, who grows up to be a sensitive young man. All he wants is to find his place in the world, but the brutality of his surroundings makes him worry he'll never find it.
    • 4/5
      Another Early Reviewer's Book, this one tells the story of a young African American man, his childhood growing up in Chicago's South Side. It's told in a series of short chapters, emphasizing how growing up with lots of loss, uncertainty and violence shapes the man that he grows into. I felt that it was disjointed at times, but thought provoking.
    • 3/5
      From the beginning, I didn't feel drawn to any of the main characters, from the oddly disappearing mother and father to the aggressive toughness of Grandma, the strangeness of Paul,and Claude's incessant crying. Gradually, Grandma's actions and Paul's words took hold and, around page 90, the plot moved forward past the horrors of daily life on the streets ofChicago's South Shore.While Claude's move to college in Missouri yielded no decent white folks and safer streets, he still was not happy and barely evolved beyond tearful responses to tension.Readers may well wish that Janice had called both Grandma and him before calling the cops. While her buried desire for revenge was completely understandable,others could have helped her channel it into choices that would not have killed both her and her new family.(Blech on any book, from ULYSSES to this one that still insists on including disgusting nose-things and snot-snot-snot.This does not add to plot or character or mood or any other development.Similarly, contrived dreams no longer work.)
    • 4/5
      This coming of age debut novel tells the story of Claude, a sensitive young African American man who grows up in the violent poverty of Chicago's South Side. He leaves Chicago to go to college, but does not escape the ties to his childhood, both good and bad. The novel reads as a series of vignettes that are surprisingly humorous while painting a picture of Claude's disfunctional life. The book is very readable and I look forward to more from this author.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed Gabriel Bump's writing style which felt somewhere between poetry and prose. His characters, especially Claude, are well developed and engaging. Bump brings humor to challenging subject matter.
    • 3/5
      This is a coming of age story of Claude, a young black man living in Chicago and wants to escape after the riots and got to school and be someone. Finds out it is easier said than done. Claude cannot escape the people and places who made him who he is. Funny at times, and certainly deals with racial injustices. Claude is a likeable character, but I’m not liking his grandmother, her boyfriend or Janice. It was a quick and easy debut novel.
    • 4/5
      An interesting debut . . . Claude's childhood is filled with people who leave him - his Mom, his Dad, his childhood friends. As he grows up, he goes through stages of crying all the time to being ostracized, to being a safe haven for a friend.In ninth grade, he meets Janice. She is also a loner. He gives her his virginity, but then they remain just friends. One Chicago night, a black boy is shot by the police and a standoff begins. The Redbelters, a local gang, arrive to push the police and an all-out riot ensues.Claude loses Janice during the riot as he tries to get to safety. He finds her at his home with his Grandma standing guard at the front door.As they grow, they go their separate ways. Claude moves to Missouri and goes to college. He works on the school newspaper. Until the day he returns to his dorm room to find Janice there.Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the characters in this debut. I enjoyed the writing style.The only complaint I have is that by the time Janice returns to Claude's life, bringing the big bad with her, I could not remember who that big bad character was. I had to go back in the book to reread where he had been before.
    • 5/5
      Claude is growing up in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago. His parents have left and he is raised by her grandmother and her friend, Paul. He's a sensitive kid who doesn't really fit in anywhere. As a young high school student he is caught in a riot between the Redbelters gang and the police--he doesn't want to join the gang, but the police won't protect him either. The chapter about the riot makes the hair on the back of your neck rise. So does the chapter towards the end of the book when Claude (now in college) and Janice (his old girlfriend from Chicago) are running from the same gang that Janice had reported to the police. This book is sometimes harrowing, often depressing, sometimes hopeful. A good read for a middle-aged white person with no idea what growing up in inner-city Chicago is like. I feel like I have a better understanding now.