Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera

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Guantanamo Boy

Publisher: Puffin (5 Feb 2009)

Language English

ISBN-10: 0141326077

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/28/guantanamo-boy

 

I am not usually very interested in realistic tales of hardship.

 

Reading through someone's struggle doesn't fascinate me, my misery memoirs reading started and ended with Dave Pelzer's 'A Boy Called It' trilogy.

 

I wasn't looking forward to reading this, but it's on the Lancashire Children's Book Award shortlist, so I read it for uni.

 

It scattered my expectations. Even now I keep being surprised at how it completely took me by surprise. Perera does a rare thing with this beautiful book, which I feel deserves a subtler, gentler cover.

 

Khalid, the protagonist, is drawn with love. He is a thoughtful, impulsive, likeable teenage boy; he cares about his dad, occasionally messes up at school, cheerfully admits to himself that he's rubbish at football. He struggles to unite his family's traditions with his settled, Western life, but no more than any teenager strains against the confines of their parents' expectations.

 

Khalid's experience of interrogation, isolation, and the withholding of basic human rights isn't immediately distressing. Perera has written with great skill and care here, making the book appropriate for younger readers, but not flinching from what Guantanamo is, and does. There were moments when I caught my breath: t

he men, ashamed of their nakedness, crying as they shower. Khalid screaming his cousin's name, poring over books for the release they give him. Dreaming of what he will do with his freedom; little dreams, but so distant for him.

 

 

Although it's undoubtedly going to teach most readers a lot about the horror of secret prisons and obtaining evidence by torture, Guantanamo Boy doesn't feel preachy. There's a wonderful lightness of touch, and a real generosity that makes Khalid a genuinely likeable young man. It was hard to move away from this book, and hard to accept that it is a work of fiction. Khalid's anger, his despair, his madness, are all perfectly written, and the sense of time wasted, of youth blown away, is achingly sad. Best of all are Khalid's clumsily eloquent words at the end, trying to describe two years of teenage life lost. A brilliant, difficult, thoughtful and incredibly skilled story.

 

Five stars for me, I really loved this book.

Edited June 6, 2010 by Echo