Karoo Boy

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After a freak accident, Douglas's twin brother is dead, and his family's fragmentation begins. His mother packs up their home in Cape Town and takes him to a tiny backwater town in the semi-desert Karoo region, where she withdraws into her painting. Douglas, a city kid in an insular community, makes only two friends: a beautiful girl named Marika, with her adventurous spirit and tyrannical father; and an old garage worker named Moses, with his junkyard Volvo and dreams of driving away to Cape Town. Against the backdrop of the bitter conflict of 1970s South Africa, Douglas develops a clearer insight into himself and his place in the world, a world where dreams and reality meet in a surprising twist. Blazing with color and light, Karoo Boy offers a sensuous and lyrical evocation of South Africa that leaves a lasting impression and ultimately ends on a note of hope.From Publishers WeeklyDeath divides a Cape Town family in Blacklaws's evocative but frustrating debut. The story, set in 1976 but narrated in a terse, foreboding and sometimes baffling present tense, begins with 14-year old Douglas Thomas's father accidentally killing his other son, Marsden (Douglas's twin), with an errant cricket pitch. Family disintegration follows: Douglas's father announces that he is "going away," and his mother decides that they're moving to Karoo—a "foreign, far, flat and bleak" place. In Karoo, Douglas befriends Moses, an old black man who works at the gas station and who cannot leave the area because his papers have been stolen. Between italicized flashbacks to Marsden and Sundays with Moses retooling a broken-down Volvo (they both dream of driving back to the ocean), Douglas falls for a girl named Marika. The novel zigzags between vivid descriptive passages and sudden bursts of violence that recall the social and political nightmare that was 1970s South Africa. The historical realities feel out of focus, however, and the characters' motives are often unclear. Though this is a coming-of-age tale, readers will be startled to learn that Douglas, when he finally returns to the seaside alone, is 18; this, along with the other narrative hinges in the story, feels sloppily handled for the sake of a rather ersatz lyrical style. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistReaders familiar with South African idiom will feel right at home in this first-person, present-tense story of a white boy's coming-of-age at the height of apartheid in the 1970s. But even those who don't know the meaning of kaffirboetie, tackies, and hambawill recognize the aching personal truth and political horror. When Dad kills Douglas' twin in a freak accident with a cricket-ball on the beautiful Cape Town beach, Dad disappears, and Mom takes Douglas and her maid, Hope, into "exile" in a tiny town in Karoo, where the landscape is largely dust and thorn. Douglas finds love with a classmate and a father in Moses, a Xhosa ex-miner, also in exile without an official pass. The newspaper headlines are about the distant Soweto riots, but the vicious racism is part of daily life even in the hinterland. The story is in the details in this first novel: the exquisite sense of place, the tender intimacy, and the casual cruelty, from murder to being forced to use separate utensils. Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved