tope folarin a particular kind of black man review

Contemplating and discussing the structure alone would be worthwhile. No one ever told me that I was supposed to differentiate what I saw during the night from during the day, that I should privilege one over the other, so everything converged”. Tunde’s lovestruck bliss is matched by his spiraling terror of connection: “It’s true, I’ve never been happier in my life,” he reflects, but then asks, “What happens after happiness?” The tragedy is that Tunde cannot even begin to come up with real answers to those questions; he would rather foreclose them with easy assumptions and easier exits. I’m not in favor of long books, but this one felt like it needed to be longer and more developed. Despite that, I am beyond impressed with how this book was written; although it's fiction, some of the narrative is so vivid, it almost feels as though you're reading a memoir. Maybe it’s because it’s been written over such a long time or maybe because of its autobiographical nature. Like most kids, Tunde is thoroughly and mostly inadvertently mostly screwed over by his parents…his mother fails to adjust to her new country and goes violently insane, his father’s lack of any forethought or research lands then as the only black family for miles around time and time again as he hops from career to career, barely getting by. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. It's an immigrant story, and focused on identity, which was fascinating, but I didn't feel it really ever resolved.Mixed feelings about this. All in all, this is a beautiful book, and I hope it finds wide readerships when it's officially released in August.This book was everything Freshwater should have been, IMO. Something about trading in one world for another, driven by pure ambitions, aspirations and desperations, hoping against all odds, striving to survive, to fit in, to prosper…I mean, that makes for some great stories. A land where his skin color separates him; where his family dynamics challenge him; and where pain and loss create a confused chasm where memories and predictability should have provided a solid foundation. I definitely have more questions than answers. The part when she over dose was to much for me. The fantasy of this patched-together family takes its final breath in a passage in which Tunde’s bootstrap-capitalist father, a determined disciple of the entrepreneurial dream, recruits his family to sell ice cream at the Hartville City Fair, using an old post office truck with a horn-shaped speaker jerry-built onto it, and a freezer scavenged from the junkyard.

Tunde’s mother, stepmother and even his girlfriend remain characters in orbit; Tunde is the sun. The story is reflective without sentiment, and intelligent without succumbing to the academic. He breaks the novel up into sections by switching Tunde’s perspective.

Tunde does not even realize how different he and his family are until he goes to kindergarten, as the family lived hermetically, so when other kids rubbed his skin raw trying to get the color out, he really didn't understand. There is so much going on- what the loss of a mother (even one who is less than ideal) does to a child’s sense of self, how a father’s unrealized dreams impact the way a son interacts with the world, how racism is so insidiously crippling and soul-des4.5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This book was layered, interesting, painful, complicated, perspective-jumping, and poetic.

Tope Folarin, who was born to Nigerian immigrants in Utah, has written his first novel, about the son of Nigerian immigrants who lived in Utah. And this is one such story told by a young man who grew up in a Nigerian family in Utah of all places and as such Tunde becomes a person without a clearly defined character. When the very hard decision is made to move to America in search of a better life, it is the hope of immigrants that their children will benefit from such an uprooting by assimilating into the new environment. Tope Folarin, a Rhodes Scholar and writer, has deemed this to be a novel, but he has mined his own life's journey for inspiration. A Particular Kind of Black Man was previously titled The Proximity of Distance. When it gets into adulthood, the author utilized some more experimental storytelling, both conceptually and narratively, and it made for an interesting, but not equally compelling read. The first two thirds or so are really effective at immersing you in the childhood of a boy living in an dually alien culture, trying to cope with an immigrant father who isn't allowed to practice his profession and a mother who succumbs to mental illness trying to cope, isolated, in Utah. I certainly recommend it, it's a very good debut novel.

I also find the character of the mom very sad.