Rebecca Jamison

This book is just wonderful and I am in awe that it is based on a true story. The novel follows Aeon, a mixed race 16 year old from Searbank (a fictional suburb of Liverpool). Growing up in England with a Black father and white mother, he was subject to racial abuse but he was never really in tune with that part of his heritage. He decides to embrace it and visits Jamaica, where his father is from, to see if he can learn more about his culture, but in Jamaica he is seen as the White boy. He travels with his (reluctant) cousin Increase who is eight years his senior. Increase has shunned his heritage after his father (Aeon's uncle) died in the 1981 riots. Jamaica is not kind to Aeon and within a matter of days he is mugged, stabbed, arrested and jailed. Whilst imprisoned, someone he had a run in with is wanting money, going after Increase to get it. Once Aeon is bailed, they decide they need to get out of Jamaica as quickly as they can, illegally. Honestly, I couldn't put this down. Ashleigh Nugent is a storyteller, that's for sure. I was so immersed in the story and felt like I could picture everything so clearly. I think having the Jamaican patois and Scouse dialect really helped - I could hear every "like" and "la"! The scenes of the prisons Aeon was kept in and his relationships both in there and with Increase are fantastic. It is a wonderfully descriptive story about a boy trying to find himself. Aeon thinks back to his teenage years with his mates, Kissy Sunshine (the only girl he ever liked) and his teacher Miss Elwyn and everything that she taught him about being a hero. It made me want to cry, I felt shocked, I laughed out loud, it educated. It gave me everything. I know it is only part fact but reading this after knowing that Nugent himself fled a Jamaican jail at the age of 17 just blows my mind.