"Honest, brave, and devasting-more than just memorable. It's impossible to look away."
In this novel set in 1980s Zimbabwe, bullies, victims, and bystanders in a boys’ boarding school form the drama, and white British high-school student Robert Jacklin plays all three roles. Rooted in the author’s personal experience, the story describes school conflict that echoes the unrest of national politics. The local whites hate President Mugabe for taking their land, but Robert’s dad at the British embassy is thrilled that the blacks are getting back the land they lost. Or are they? With a huge cast of students and teachers, it is not easy to keep the characters straight. Wallace never romanticizes either side, though. The racist insults and the constant violence extend from the dormitory and classroom to the local villages, and as the students join the turmoil, Robert must confront his own shame. The story’s climax is over the top, but the fast-paced school drama, with issues about guilt, survival, and responsibility, will pull older teens, and adults, too.
*"This novel excels, bringing readers up to the grim, uncertain present with mastery."
*"This novel excels, bringing readers up to the grim, uncertain present with mastery."
Wallace’s debut, inspired by his own experiences as a teen, is a bleak, morally complex, and emotionally charged coming-of-age story set in Zimbabwe during the turbulent 1980s, just after Robert Mugabe’s controversial rise to power. Robert Jacklin is a young man from England, whose family has moved to Africa as part of a diplomatic posting, and he’s promptly sent to Haven, a prestigious boarding school struggling to cope with the new social order. Over the next few years, Robert deals with hazing, unconventional teachers, and his dysfunctional family, while trying to develop his own identity. Against his better judgment, he befriends cruel and controlling Ivan Hascott, a fellow white student, whose family has suffered under Mugabe’s rule, and who urges Robert to join him in tormenting black Africans. Robert grows distraught over Ivan’s increasingly violent actions, his own accountability, and the tumultuous state of the country. His turmoil finally builds to a climactic moment that will haunt him for the rest of his life. Racial conflict, corruption, and the cycle of abuse are conveyed with authenticity in this uncomfortable, unvarnished story. Ages 15–up. (Apr.)
Gr 9 Up—This taut drama is set at an elite boarding school in Zimbabwe during the 1980s, soon after the end of the brutal war between white colonialists and black Africans. Young Jacklin, recently arrived from England, hasn't been a party to the bloody revolution that saw white, minority-controlled Rhodesia become Zimbabwe, with Robert Mugabe as its first black Prime Minister. Robert is accustomed to integrated classes; others are not. Pranks and hazing quickly cross the line into vicious schoolyard bullying and savage hate crimes against nearby villagers. Readers will not condone Robert's behavior, but they'll sympathize as he slides into an alliance with Ivan, a charismatic classmate and racist bully. His unseemly betrayal of his black friend, Nelson, is heart wrenching, and Wallace's use of the narrator's present-day thoughts to hauntingly foreshadow this event, and others, is powerful. Rage, vengeance, and the desire for retribution are convincingly portrayed as the tension is ratcheted up through to the heart-pounding conclusion. This thought-provoking narrative offers teens a window into a distinctive time and place in history that is likely to be unfamiliar to most of them. A first purchase for high schools, especially those with a strong world cultures curriculum.—Patricia N. McClune, Conestoga Valley High School, Lancaster, PA
A boarding-school story set in the aftermath of the Rhodesian Civil War examines evil from all sides and provides no easy answers. The Haven School for boys is anything but for narrator Robert Jacklin. When the boy arrives from England at 13, the son of a liberal intellectual attached to the British Embassy, he initially makes friends with one of the school's few black students, but he quickly learns that safety and acceptance are among the school's white elite. Over the course of the next five years he changes from likable milquetoast into a thug's accessory, understanding and hating but choosing to ignore his moral compromise. Wallace, in his debut, draws on his own childhood in post-revolutionary Zimbabwe to inform this grimly magnetic snapshot of petty evil. In many regards, it's a classic boarding-school novel, full of A Separate Peace–like inevitability; narrator Robert is liberal with "had I but known" statements foreshadowing some kind of doom. But as Robert's mentor in brutality becomes ever more unhinged, the tension ratchets up and the book turns into a first-rate, surprisingly believable thriller. In its portrayal of race relations in a wounded country as well as of the ugly power dynamics of a community of adolescent boys, this novel excels, bringing readers up to the grim, uncertain present with mastery. (Historical fiction. 14 & up)
