4 stars

Ever read a book with such hypnotic writing that you lose all sense of place and time? Welcome to the words of Everywhere You Don't Belong.

Writing: ★★★★★
Characters: ★★★★
Plot/Pacing: ★★★★

Claude McKay Love is just trying to live and thrive in life. Born and raised as a Black man on the South Side of Chicago, Claude's lot is already complex and complicated. It's made even more so with the introduction of riots around his home and the situation of his area. His grandmother, a product of the civil rights era, pushes Claude toward change, and his family members, neighbors, and others in his community push to make him act one way or the other.

But Claude is just trying to live.

As we stride hand-in-hand with Claude through his childhood years and into adulthood, we have a front-row seat to his struggles to identify as a member of the Black community while also hesitant to put himself out there. He tries to leave his past and place in society behind him by leaving the South Side, attending college, and reinventing himself... but that only works well for a hot second, because as the saying goes, "you take yourself with you, wherever you go" and it's hard to outrun the fact that he's Black in America today. And at the end of the day, does Claude even want to outrun himself?

With poignancy, pain, violence, and heartbreak, Everywhere You Don't Belong sounds like the opposite of a funny, heartwarming read. And yet author Gabriel Bump manages to make you laugh and smile along with Claude. It's in the writing. Bump has done something special with this debut... it sings. I strongly encourage all to read this not only for the poignant commentary but also for its shining example of endurance and light.

A powerful book, and an author with writing to watch.

Thank you to Algonquin Books for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

"Baby, Grandma said, don't get yourself killed."

Sadly, this sentence is said more often to young black men than should be necessary. Everywhere You Don't Belong by debut novelist Gabriel Bump is a fascinating look into the life of a quiet decent young black man who just wants to live his life with his friends and family but everyone keeps leaving; some not by choice but by violence.

Unfortunately, Claude's story is not a new one when we meet him. Abandoned by his parents he is raised by his fierce Grandma and Paul her live in friend. Growing up on the south side of Chicago he hears about, sees and feels violence most days. He believes his escape will be through education and he leaves for college to be a journalist. Unfortunately, systemic racism exists throughout all of America.

What makes this story so unique is the way it is told with simple prose, dark humor and snappy dialogue. I found myself laughing at the witty antics over debates about basketball greats Scottie Pippen, Patrick Ewing, and Willis Reed. I giggled over Nugget's insane love of bologna. I smiled at the chapter entitled Tacos and Hendrix. I also found hope in Claude and Janice's romance.

This book will anger you, touch your heart, and give you a smile. It does everything a good novel is suppose to do for its readers.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via #NetGalley for a fair and honest review. All opinions are my own.

This book from the beginning was kind of confusing with the setting. I recommend going into this book with some background of the book before you start it. Once I got a few chapters into it and we were introduced to the setting and characters I really enjoyed it. I read almost the entire thing in one sitting. This book discusses the topic of race inequality and how it effects people in the long run. We followed two African American teenagers who are from Chicago and their struggles to defy the stereotypes of drug dealers and prostitution. This was just an addictive book I didn’t want to put it down. I highly recommend it to anyone to pick up!

Everywhere You Don't Belong is an insightful debut novel that revolves an average teenager and his coming-of-age.

The story is layered with social commentaries, particularly the still rampant issue about racial discrimination and how the society views dark-skinned individual.

The writing style is commendable and easy to follow through. Gabriel Bump did a good job narrating the story of our unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love.

Fierce. Original. Relevant. Timely.

4stars for this amazing debut!

Poignant and so timely, Everywhere You Don't Belong, Gabriel Bump's debut novel, packs a powerful punch.

Growing up on Chicago’s South Side, Claude McKay Love has seen a lot of things. Raised by his Civil Rights-era activist grandmother and her best friend, they try to make him believe he can achieve greatness. But Claude has mostly seen mediocrity and abandonment, and he doesn’t believe that greatness is routinely accessible by young Black men.

But as his community is rocked by violence and caught in a tug-of-war between those wanting to change things and those who want power of their own, Claude realizes he wants more. He wants simple—love, success, safety, a feeling of belonging—but believes to achieve that he must do what has been done to him—leave.

Yet Claude quickly realizes that even a change of location doesn’t change the situation for him. To get what he wants may take everything he has—and may be dangerous—but he can’t let life pass him by or it will swallow him up.

What a tremendously thought-provoking book this was! At turns funny, sad, shocking, hopeful, and insightful, Bump takes you on a roller-coaster ride that seems exaggerated in places but is all too real for some.

I’ll definitely be thinking about this one for a while. There’s some violence in the book, which may be a trigger for some, but it’s not gratuitous. It may sound like an intense read, and it has its moments, but all in all, it's just a really good book.

I was glad to be part of the blog tour celebrating the paperback release of Everywhere You Don't Belong. My thanks to Algonquin Books and NetGalley provided me with a complimentary copy in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making it available!!

Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump
Fiction, Coming of Age
Algonquin Books | February 4th, 2021
4/5 Stars


Claude McKay Love lives with his grandmother and her friend Paul on the South Side of Chicago. His parents abandoned him when he was only five, which has a huge impact on his life. He’s sensitive and doesn’t have many friends. Claude’s activist grandma is a big influence in his life, encouraging him to continue his education while also avoiding the drug and violence scene taking place in their neighborhood.

After a violent riot on the South Side, Claude wants nothing more than to get out of Chicago and escape the injustice. Hoping to find a place where he can fit in and not worry, he starts college in Missouri. Sadly, Missouri isn’t much better than Chicago and Claude is forced to face the same injustices he faced in his youth in his hometown.

Everywhere You Don’t Belong is a strong debut from Gabriel Bump, covering a relevant issue, that sadly still going on today. I highly recommend this book and I’m glad I had the chance to read an advanced copy.

Thank you, Algonquin Books and NetGalley for an arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Everywhere You Don't Belong was my first read of the year. I was drawn to the smooth flow of the writing at first. Gabriel Bump's writing style is very enriching and easy to get into. Once you begin, you flow along with it like riding along the waves. You travel with Claude and see the riots, the world, the fear from his eyes.

EYDB is fast paced and rightly so, it moves fast. And in that motion, we're introduced to so much in such a beautiful manner. Claude's story starts with his childhood where Bump meticulously places the base for his growth. His grandma is a force to reckon with, fierce and open, and I adored her friendship with Paul. Some may say it's obnoxiously weird but to me, I think it was very wholesome. I enjoyed the fact that Bump focused so much on developing the relationships while also appearing to not dwell too much on them at once.

Everything gets fairly intense towards the end. That is where I felt more conflicted, I won't lie. I didn't know if I was in accordance and agreement with Claude's decisions. But then again, I do feel like it was realistic.

That said, I do also think that it might not be for everyone. If you've read and loved books like The Mothers by Britt Benette, EYDB stays on the same vicinity.

At the end, I think Everywhere You Don't Belong was intense right from the beginning and will make you ponder upon difficult questions about love, race, identity and family.

Gabriel Bump’s debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, is a dark comedy that is filled with sharp observations of race and class. The novel is well paced as it follows the coming of age story of Claude McKay as he awkwardly navigates life in Chicago’s South Side. This book is an excellent reflection of this current period within America.
One passage that stood out to me is: “And black America still isn’t free. And black men are still dying. And black women are still dying. And there’s anger, yes, there’s anger. And that anger has to go away when you go to work or go to school or ride the bus or go to the grocery store or go to a movie downtown. And that anger has to go away-if it doesn’t how to you survive?”

Gabriel Bump dedicates his thought-provoking debut novel Everywhere You Don't Belong to his Grandma and young Black men like Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Travon Martin, among others.

Set in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, teenage Claude lives with Grandma and her friend Paul. Grandma participated in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Paul is gay and unlucky in love. Grandma gets Claude into a Catholic school on the other side of the tracks, but Claude is bullied at school because he is "bad at sports, no jokes, no rich parents, no excellent homework to steal and copy."

A few months into his tenure at Catholic school, his Grandma and the nuns had a disagreement about sexual abstinence (Grandma is against it), and Claude and Catholic school part ways. Grandma is quite a character, but she loves Claude.

Basketball was everything in Chicago at this time- the Bulls had Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman, who were all on team that won multiple championships. Claude wasn't any good at basketball, but his best friend Jonah was a superstar. When Claude was badly beat up by Jonah's rival, Jonah's parents move him away, and Claude is left alone.

The South Side was also home to the Redbelters, who Grandma says thinks they are Black Panthers, but they recruit kids to sell drugs for them. When Claude and his friends are caught in the middle of a deadly riot between cops and the Redbelters, the neighborhood is being torn apart live on the nightly news.

Claude wants to escape and so he goes to college in Missouri to study journalism. His hopes of being his own person is hindered by his fellow students and teachers who once again want to define him by his race. When a young woman from home tracks him down, he has to decide where his future lies.

Everywhere You Don't Belong is a worthy addition to the best coming-of-age novels, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to The Catcher in the Rye to more current ones like Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give. Bump creates a character in Claude who comes alive on the page. Good authors put us in the shoes and minds of their characters, and Bump does that with great empathy and a little humor (Grandma and Paul provide that). I highly recommend Everywhere You Don't Belong, and I'm not alone. The New York Times chose it as one of their 100 Notable Books of 2020.

Thansk for Algonquin Books for putting me on Gabriel Bump's tour.

Claude McKay Love is an average kid who wants to fit in. But riots in his South Side Chicago neighborhood change his life. He decides to escape the city and go to college. No matter where he goes, though, he can't find a place to belong.
I found the book heartbreaking. According to this book, life in this neighborhood is basically a dead-end filled with trauma, drama, violence, and hardship. And Claude can't escape even though he leaves. That reality occurs way too often for youth from the inner city.
I did skim through most of this book due to strong profanity. But I appreciate that it's an accurate look at life in an environment that's vastly different from the one I grew up in.

Everywhere you don't belong

"And confusion is dangerous when you’re standing in the middle of the street and not sure if you should go with the gang that kills people or the cops that kill people. And there’s only one option. And that option is standing with your people. We’re free. We’re free. We’re free. We’re free. History says we’re free. We’re free."

This coming of age novel is so good. I could not put it down and felt like I was there with Claude through all of his experiences.

He's being raised by his grandma and her friend Paul, in South Shore in Chicago. He's a sad, sweet, little Black kid whose parents abandoned him. 

The book starts with Claude's memories from age 5 and moves up through middle school high school, and some college. The writing is so immediate and visceral.  The author brings in the love of a place, when that place is being torn apart.

Claude lives through a huge riot in his neighborhood which is started by the police murdering a young Black child.  The quote above is from that part of the book.

Much of the story is related to the riot in some way, and death and abandonment are prominent in Claude's life from the very beginning.

The book is heartbreaking and sad, yet it doesn't leave the reader broken. It's also fast-paced and full of wonderful, outrageous characters.

Thank you Algonquin for providing me with an ARC before the the paperback release.

A welcome and needed glimpse into the life and mind of a young, black male in Chicago, Everywhere You Don’t Belong is set amidst historical riots and landmark events. Claude is an intelligent but conflicted youth growing up in a broken and chaotic home that makes up with love and humor what it lacks in convention. As he grows, you witness the path the shapes his tender heart, leading him into a bright future.

Bump’s unique writing style lends to the raw and intense subject matter while hinting at the youthfulness of the main character and author. Highlighting a quiet soul amongst a violent background, he serves an insight into what can often be difficult to interpret amidst political and racial tension. Throughout the story, you’re introduced to a wide range of characters, with many temporary roles and very few permanent structures. Oddball guardians, Paul and Grandma, offer a comedic respite from the tragic routine of the South Shore, while Janice supplies a friendly and romantic relationship rife with angsty teen realism.

Reading this is an experience that will stay with me for awhile and I look forward to sharing this book with friends and readers.

Many thanks to Algonquin Books for a complimentary copy of this book. The opinions are my own.

I'm a sucker for a Chicago writer and what can I say, Bump nails it. This is an underrated book that deserves to be lauded and I can't wait to see what more Bump does.

Disclaimer: I received this ebook from the publisher. Thanks! All opinions are my own.

Book: Everywhere You Don’t Belong

Author: Gabriel Bump

Book Series: Standalone

Rating: 5/5

Diversity: Black American main characters and focused stories

Recommended For...: contemporary lovers, ya readers, cultural reads

Publication Date: February 4, 2020

Genre: YA Contemporary

Recommended Age: 16+ (slight violence, injustice, trauma, childhood violence, racism, slight romance)

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Pages: 264

Synopsis: In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn’t dangerous or brilliant—he’s an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home. 
 
Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights–era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America. 
 
Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don’t Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.

Review: I really liked this book! I thought the book did well to make a story and make it so engaging that I lost myself in the book. The character development is amazing, the world building was amazing and the writing was masterful! The book does well to show the trials and tribulations that most Black Americans face today, including injustice and generational pain through racism. The book also opens in such a lyrical and beautiful fashion. The book, for the second half of it, then centers on a person who is experiencing another sort of trauma. The book is beautiful from start to finish and you will cry.

The only thing that I didn’t really like about the book was that sometimes the pacing was a bit slow.

Verdict: Highly recommend!

This just didn’t do it for me.

There was great potential for expanding the depth of the other characters, and it would’ve been great if we explicitly got more of Claude’s thoughts regularly.

The author tries to provide the nuance and complexity of situations, but a lot of it just kind of...falls flat. The last third of the book also gets a little confusing as you get the feeling he’s going back and forth in time/memories.

BOOK REVIEW FOR THE OAKVILLE NEWS

By Kate Barlow

Everywhere You Don’t Belong by GABRIEL BUMP
Published by Algonquin Books (February, 2020) (366 words)

Every now and then a book comes along at exactly the right time, in this case what it is like to grow up poor and black in a tough part of town at this moment in American history. It is also witty and darkly irreverent.
We meet Claude McKay Love as a small boy, newly deserted by his parents and left in the care of his civil rights-era grandmother and her gay male friend. To say life is bewildering for this young black boy growing up in a poor part of Chicago’s South Shore is putting it mildly. Claude is not a tough guy but a gentle soul whose ‘tough love’ Grandma steers him away him from local gang violence and convinces him to stay in school. He is a kid who cries easily, loves his friends and is distraught when police shoot and kill a friend who had been seen entering a neighbourhood house. The ‘intruder’ had been asked to feed the cats while the owners were away.
This is author Gabriel Bump’s first novel. A young African American writer also from South Shore Chicago, Bump received his Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He has already earned his place as a writer to watch with pieces in Slam magazine, the Huffington Post and the Springhouse Journal among others and was awarded the 2016 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction.
Everywhere You Don’t Belong is a quick read, with a narrative that races along taking the reader on a helter-skelter journey, bringing you to tears one moment and having you laughing out loud the next. And keep an eye out for the sly innuendo of ‘cars dodged the potholes with grace’ and the perceptive and deeply sad comment that ‘society doesn’t want (African Americans) to go anywhere’
Jump wholeheartedly into this fast-paced coming-of-age novel, and it will take you behind the television clips, the anti-racism marches and the police brutality and give you glimpses of the poverty, but also the love and loyalty of a community under siege.

A wonderful book about social justice and racism written in a very dark humorous style. Also a very timely work!

Oh wow. Where to start?

Claude is our protagonist whose life we follow and see him coping with love, being and feeling abandoned by so many people, hectic life in Chicago with violence and riots, and him experiencing love, heartbreak, and growing up.
The eccentric characters that come in and out of his life are so hilarious and at times heartbreaking. I really loved reading about all the side characters.
This novel read like a movie. I've gotta say, I don't think I've ever read anything like this before. It sorta reminded me of reading a novel written in poetry but it wasn't and was written in prose. Maybe that's what was so weird about it, it was like reading about the inner workings of one of the most awkward yet real characters ever.
I put it down very few times and finished it in a couple of days.

Though I did not care for the book, I will still recommend it because I appreciate the story that was told. It will resonate with a lot of teens at our library.

Breathtaking. I read it in two sittings a week apart. I’m feeling like this is the best adult novel I’ve read this year. My heart hurts; it gave me a brain freeze of the soul. It’s chock full of potent quotables. Can we talk about Connie Stove? I used to know a Paul, but his name was Jim. This book has rendered me incoherent. Please read it.