Sunday, April 27, 2014
I'm Still here!!!
I know I haven't posted in a while. Since I've taken a break from doing reviews that were requested I haven't been blogging like I was. This will soon change though! I am working on my finals now and when they are done, which will be soon you can expect to see more posts from me! Can't wait to get back to blogging!!!

Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Book Review by Guy Donovan of ‘A Rebel Comes of Age’ by Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall
Inspired by Occupy Wall Street, seventeen-year-old Angela Jones and four other homeless teenagers occupy an empty commercial building owned by Bank of America. As they slowly transform it into a teen homeless shelter, Ange goes into crisis mode when the other residents decide to use firearms to keep a police SWAT team from evicting them.
*I was given a copy of this book in exchange for my honest
review*
The sequel to ‘The Battle for Tomorrow: A Fable,’ ‘A Rebel
Comes of Age’ tells the story of a 17-year-old girl named Angela Jones (‘Ange’
to her friends) as she and a few other teenage friends attempt to open and
manage a shelter for homeless teens in an abandoned credit union building in
New York City’s Bedford-Stuyvesant area.
Despite the fact that the building, which Ange and her friends christen
‘Freedom House’, is owned by Bank of America, they choose that location,
knowing in advance that it will no doubt lead to a legal showdown with B of A
and, likely, a physical one with law enforcement when they are inevitably ordered
evicted.
The novel is written in the third person, past tense. It is made clear early on that despite the
third person presentation, the novel is about Ange and Ange alone, making the
reader’s understanding of the other characters’ motivations or thoughts on any
of the goings-on dependent entirely on Ange’s perception of them or the ensuing
dialog. Sometimes this is quite
effective and sometimes it is not. On
the whole though, it is a very easy read with little confusion as to what is
going on or why, with the exceptions being the narrative elements that are
intended by design to provide confusion for Ange as she goes through the story.
Readers who are averse to stories that present dialog
written as it sounds may take issue with many of the surrounding characters in
this novel. For the most part though, I
found the author’s use of slang and intentional misspellings added a realistic
flavor to the story of youths who have grown up mostly on the streets of New
York City.
The way in which the author provides support to the cast of
young protagonists in the form of several protest organizations and a local
church group propels the story along to its conclusion in a clean, effective manner
but I felt that it also tended to minimize the struggles that such young,
inexperienced types would have in attempting to organize such a daunting
project. In fact, I felt more than once
that the novel would have been served better for the young people of Freedom
House to have to struggle just a bit harder.
Quite a bit is offered up to them by various characters/community groups
with minimal effort, hampering the feeling that what they were striving for was
something that was hard to accomplish.
Conversely, however, there are numerous examples of strife
from within the group of teens itself that rung true, particularly given the
places and home lives that many of these characters are indicated as having
come from. These internal problems in
fact provide for much of the conflict that Ange must deal with in order to both
attain her goals of making Freedom House a permanent establishment and truly
coming of age as a person.
On a negative note, I feel compelled to point out that the
flow of the story became increasingly hampered by a number of misspellings,
typos, and even incorrect details involving weapons terminology that mounted
toward the climax of the novel. I
understand completely that self-edited novels such as ‘A Rebel Comes of Age’
are more likely to contain such errors than so-called ‘professional’ novels (a
term I have come to detest, by the way) but after a point they can become a
hindrance to the story and that is, unfortunately the case here. A second pass by the author would be in the
novel’s best interests.
On a more positive note though, I found ‘A Rebel Comes of
Age’ to be an effective story of a teen with a dream, drive, and determination
to take on daunting odds while struggling to find her own identity in a world
that, from her viewpoint at least, has no interest in her. And that, after all, is at the heart of all
great protagonists.
I do recommend this novel to anyone interested in/outraged
by the growing dominance of the world’s major corporations over our elected
officials and our very lives. While
clearly wearing her political heart upon her sleeve, Dr. Bramhall has provided
the youth of today with a character role model in Angela ‘Ange’ Jones. She, and people like her represent a hope for
a better future that must sometimes be striven for, rather than given to you.
Labels:
book review

Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)