Harry is not a swell fella. Neither are his folks, so there's that - he can't take all the blame. I rode this pony to the very end, hoping for a concrete reason (message to Reader) to spend all this time with Harry, and came away rather dismayed to not be clear on many things. I admit and own that I do not understand many parts of Harry's story, and it is my fault, I'm sure.

Here's what I think I get:
* Harry is a white person who thinks he has black sensibilities, mostly
* Harry is wrong about that, in a big way
* Huzzah for Harry leaving home - that's better for all concerned (so their individual leanings no longer lean on and harm others in their family group)
* Maryam (a Nigerian woman) rocked, hard - still don't know why she stuck around, tho
* Harry is all about Harry to the very end

Here's what has me lost in the weeds:
* Harry needed to be set straight just about every day - why didn't that happen?
* Maryam. . .again. Tolerant too long.
* The Very End - ?

Perhaps a brighter light will shine for me in a future read, and if so, I will here update.

*A Sincere Thank You to Chinelo Okparanta, Mariner Books, and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review.* #HarrySylvesterBird #NetGalley

I am not a huge fan of this book. That might have been that I never really gelled with the titular character. Also, I found it had a lot of improbable things occur that had me shaking my head in disbelief. Not an awful read but nothing to set it apart from so many other novels out there.

I hadn't read many satirical novels before this year, and I found myself reading several! This was entertaining, but WOOF was it stressful and hard to read at times (which was the point!). I'll be thinking about this one for a while.

n 2006, at 14, Harry travels with his parents, Wayne and Chevrolet, to Tanzania. Already acutely aware that his parents are neglectful and not much his cup of tea, Harry calls them by their first names. Wayne is selfish, racist, boorish, politically a member of a third party, the "Purists," who just won the presidential election. They are obviously MAGAs but with their own party. Wayne is an untenured professor at an unnamed school in their fictitious town of Edward, Pennsylvania, located near the famous still-burning town of Centralia. Chevy is germaphobic, constantly critical, and runs an Ayurveda healing clinic. She's right in there with Wayne politically. In Tanzania, as Wayne and Chevy continually embarrass Harry with their xenophobic, racist and classist comments during tours and in the hearing of locals, Harry meets a "dark" man who pays attention to him and makes him a special gift. Harry never forgets that this man "saw" him and was kind to him like no one has ever been.

The family hits hard times financially and Harry essentially runs as fast as he can to college in New York by accepting a sell-your-soul opportunity that he recognizes as problematic. There, he meets Maryam, a Nigerian (although I'm not completely sure she's Nigerian from how she shares this with Harry) woman on a student visa. In New York, Harry also begins to actively work toward realizing his belief that he (is/should be/wants to b)e Black. Given this, one would think that his relationship with Maryam would be completely superficial, solely based on her being the right race and from a continent he associates with a happy experience. Instead, Okparanta creates a real friendship, a deeply loving relationship but one where Harry continually says and does things that shows his many assumptions about race that still reflect the common racism of white people in the USA. Maryam is fundamentally a decent person who is more mature than Harry, but enjoys him and sees his essential goodness. She subtly and not so subtly alerts Harry to his biases, but he does not realize how she has influenced him or how badly he has behaved until, he looks back at his life after their college years.

In the meantime Harry bobs along through life, trying to assimilate as a Black man, yet sounding suspiciously like a white guy who hasn't a clue. Okparanta constantly sneaks in just about believable incidents that test who Harry really is, often juxtaposed against Maryam, whose moral compass and sense of who she is is well formed. I think to like this book at the level I like it, you have to feel sympathy and compassion for the not always likable Harry. I see him as growing, but not as fast as he should because he isn't paying attention to Maryam's cues. And in other ways, his efforts to be Black are so inauthentic that Maryam is simply bewildered. Because, while he hints at this, he doesn't out and out tell her he is or wants to be Black.

I find Okparanta's satire priceless, she thoroughly schools us on how white "allies" who believe they have assimilated cannot and have not but in an amusing manner that even has heart for Harry.

This is a book of satire. The premise of the book: a young White male who identifies as Black rejects his racist parents and falls for a Nigerian student. Since this is satire about race, many of the satirical moments are cringe worthy.

The author's attempt to write from a white male’s perspective is admirable but still comes across as a Black woman’s view. The author also includes pandemic references in the book. Readers who seek to escape from the actual pandemic will encounter it heavily in this book.

Because of the author’s use of satire and the subject of race in the book, this would make an interesting book club pick. It will elicit strong opinions for a lively discussion.

I received an advanced copy of the book from Mariner Books via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

Interesting premise, but this book was difficult for me to engage with as an e-book. Im waiting for my physical copy in the mail. I hope to have better luck witht the physical copy since this author’s previous novel, Under the Udala Trees, is one of my favorite books of all time.

The book opens with the teenaged Harry Sylvester Bird on an African safari with his supremely racist and entitled parents. Back home in a small Pennsylvania town, further depths of parental awfulness are revealed. Harry flees to college in New York City where he has to deal with the pandemic, the growth of a white supremacist movement and his general awkwardness. He also manages to meet and fall in love with Maryam, a fellow student from Nigeria.

The blurb for this book is pretty accurate, but I found it to be only intermittently provocative. Satire is hard to do. It can be either too heavy handed or too subtle. I think this book leans too far towards the heavy handed side. The most interesting part to me was Harry’s belief that he was really meant to be black, but for long stretches of the book this theme was ignored. The author should also have provided some reason why Maryam would have wasted more than 2 dates on Harry. 3.5 stars

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

This is an odd little book that is set in the now and the close future. It explores race through the lens of Harry, a white youth who in step with the times, is rejecting his whiteness... or trying to. I enjoyed the parts that were set in Africa--both Ghana and Tanzania. The descriptions of Harry's parents and his relationship with them was baffling and a little hard to imagine. But that's the cleverness of this story--it keeps you just slightly uncomfortable which is a step stone to considering the society we live in and where we may be going. Okparanta's view of our world is disturbing but, sadly, doesn't feel unrealistic at all.

If you're looking for something different to read, try spending some time with Harry Sylvester Bird. I found it very worthwhile!

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. I hope it sparks a lot of conversation!

Wow. This book was unexpected and uncomfortable but I give Okapranta major credit for writing such a discussion-worthy satire. Harry - a white boy - is being raised by parents who are racist, clueless, and financially irresponsible in a small college town in Pennsylvania. He greatly dislikes them and escapes to New York as soon as he can. In New York he meets and begins dating a Nigerian woman. This is probably the first book I've ever read where a Black woman writes a from a white male perspective and that's where some of my uncomfortableness comes from in the book. But given that white men have written from people of color and women's perspectives for centuries, I welcome this. There's a ton in this book to digest but in order to appreciate it fully, you need to embrace the satire.

Satire is a difficult genre to pull off. I don't think "Harry Sylvester Bird" did what it set out to do. This book is meant to be outrageous and lewd. It's supposed to shock you and tick you off, but I didn't feel empowered while reading it. I just felt annoyed. The titular character is a withdrawn boy growing up with horribly racist parents. I just couldn't get into the story. I couldn't take it seriously, the parents come off as cliche-ridden and forced. I've known racist people in the past, and they sure as heck don't show their true colors right off the bat. The parents were so upfront and direct with their racism that it made it seem comical. Which is why I don't think the satire angle worked for this book. Also, it was hard to feel empathy for Harry because he grows-up to be a big douche just like his parents. It was so over-the-top and off-putting. I've read better novels on this subject matter, and this one fell flat for me.

Yawn. Harry Sylvester Byrd is a young white man who identifies as black. Throw in some very racist parents and you have a very interesting story, potentially. Unfortunately, I found Harry , who calls himself G-Dawg (that goes over well), to be totally unlikable. He is uncouth, self-absorbed, immature, and socially inappropriate. I could have forgiven him if he showed some personal growth but nope, not even a smidgen. And the romance between Harry and Maryam made me dizzy from all of my eye-rolling. Okay, so he did a pretty cool school project but it was totally unbelievable. I love a good satire but Harry Sylvester Byrd didn't work for me.

Thanks to Mariner Books for the drc via Netgalley. Publication slated for 7-12-22.

I do not get what all of the hype is about I found this book to be very poorly written, with little to no character development. A hard pass.

Interesting premise, that a son is so ashamed of his racist parents that he longs to be black; Chevrolet and Wayne are indeed the worst white people ever to mess up raising a child. I loved hating them, as they bickered at home in Edward, PA and made asses of themselves away on safari, and egregiously neglected little Harry all over the place. However, as Harry grew and left home, the sprawling story grew as disjointed as its timeline, and for me just didn't come together cohesively. I wanted to follow the Purist sub-plot, but wish I'd been given more back-story. Harry is a difficult narrator to follow, as his crying-and-leaving episodes become more frequent and his emotions more intense, we don't get to understand why Centralia so affects him, or why his idealism gives no sway or why his selfishness and immaturity don't seem to lessen with age.

I really liked Okparanta's sensitive character Maryam, as she gradually tired of Harry's confusion and cultural appropriation. But I did not at all get her acceptance of Harry's new cringe-inducing moniker G-Dawg, or their morning sbooty habit either. I don't know why I like Chinelo Okparanta's writing about the characters around Harry but not Harry himself? Maybe that's intentional on her part considering his confusing issues like the rinsing obsession and race reallocation? As glad as I was to reach the ending, I didn't like the cliffhanger nature of it.

Harry Sylvester Bird is a satire about a young white man who thinks he is transracial (Black). He finds his parents' overt racism to be embarrassing, and when he leaves them for college and starts dating Maryam, a Black woman, he tries to "find himself" as the person he thinks he is.

The book itself is a cringe-fest - if you're not up for that kind of satire, this might not be the one for you. It's very clear early on that Harry is a caricature, and that the reader is not supposed to like him or root for him. Because of this, I can see readers either being quickly fed up with him or, as I did, become unable to look away from the trainwreck happening before them.

Still, Okparanta treads the line of satire well without falling into the trap of making the entire book eyeroll-inducing. Neither the plot nor the characters quite veer into farce territory, and the setting itself is eerily reminiscent of where the United States as a society is now without being over-the-top for comedic effect. I find it can be a delicate balance to make satire feel like a real critique versus satire for satire's sake, and Okparanta's ability to craft character and environment make for a read that is a great example of the genre.

Overall, I think if you know what to expect going in, you'll get more out of the book. The summary blurb might be a little misleading, as it's not as clear that you're getting a cringe-inducing satire here, and a good one at that. However, because of this, I don't think the re-readability is high; it's definitely worth a read, but not enough to make space on an already-full bookshelf (not speaking from experience here at all...).

Thank you to Mariner and NetGalley for providing a copy for review.

I was lucky to receive an ARC of this book through netgalley in exchange for an honest review, so i'd like to thank the publisher for sending me this book.

What can I say about this book? I am speechless, amazed by the storytelling crafted by the author here, the sheer AUDACITY!!!! Chinelo Okparanta is one of my favorite authors of this century and I have yet to be disappointed by her work. I am at awe by the amount of nuance, scandalous behavior, toxicity and innocence brought to Harry's character all at once. I found myself being pulled from every direction. The character work in this novel consists of various uphill battles of empathizing with Harry while also despising him deeply. I found the pacing to be straight to the point, very clean. I was gripped by this story from page one and managed to finish the book very quickly because it was such a page turner. This book will encourage people to take a closer look at child abuse, generational trauma, the dangers of white innocence, white liberalism and memory. Memory is a theme that is constantly revisited throughout this novel. And I really like the various ways it was explored from beginning to end. I thought this book was brilliant, funny, and I wanted to scream at times while reading this book publicly because so much kept happening, each chapter more appalling than the next. I really liked Maryam as a character. I admired her confidence but also recognized her own suffering through it all, while trying to build some sort of normalcy for herself, with the sorrows of displacement, migration and the daily cruelties of the world constantly at her neck. Many times I found myself wanting to protect her from her own decisions, gosh she needed it. I keep wondering what it is that she saw in that man that we the readers couldn't see, I'm always curious about questionable choices characters make. I loved that she had locs, I loved how tender she was, how she was able to follow her gut in the end and chose what was best for her.

Overall this was a satisfying read. I rated this 4 / 5 stars.

I fully expected to love this book based on the description - "a brilliant, provocative, up-to-the-minute novel about a young white man’s education and miseducation in contemporary America" who falls in love with a black woman from Nigeria and is forced to reckon with his racist upbringing and society at large? Wow, yes, sign me up. Unfortunately, I found the description far more intriguing and powerful than the book itself.

It started off strong - we begin with a teenage Harry enduring a trip to Tanzania with his unabashedly racist parents, Chevy and Wayne, who "wear their ignorance with confidence, like a God-given and indisputable birthright" - but by the halfway point (once Harry moves out), it had become something I had to push my way through, and it remained that way through the end.

I understand that Harry, especially as he ages into adulthood, is not intended to be a likable character - but he really seemed to push the boundaries of an evil cartoon caricature. I was disgusted by him throughout most of the book (in some moments, that disgust progressed to visceral, skin-crawling repulsion). One of my biggest issues with this story: I couldn't for the life of me find any reason Maryam would tolerate five minutes in his company, let alone pursue a relationship with him.

At one point, Harry recognizes Maryam's (regrettably short-lived) frustration towards him, describing her as "visibly weary of me" - coincidentally, that's exactly how I felt about him and his cowardly, gaslightly, fetishizing, self-pitying behaviors. (I could go on.) This is a man who has accepted a scholarship from a white-supremacy organization and soothed himself by telling himself that it's OK because he's not white in his heart, a man who is constantly comparing his own life to that of slaves and concluding his own circumstances are as bad if not worse. How anyone could perceive him as sympathetic is beyond me.

To be clear, I'm by no means indifferent to this book: I actively hated it. I'm a white woman, and I am open to the idea that I was *supposed* to hate this book. Maybe there's something that hits a little too close to home: Harry's probably the type of guy to throw a BLM sign on his front lawn, then privately vote NIMBY (and on the off chance that a black family does move in next door, well, how "exotic" for him). That all said, I just didn't find any nuance in Harry's character. Even though he's supposedly reflecting back on his choices at the end, I saw no evidence of real understanding.

Two stars because the writing itself was strong, and frankly because even though I hated this book, it's an accomplishment in that it elicited such strong feelings. (I'm very curious to see how others respond to this book.)

Thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for an ARC in exchange for my honest (as honest as it gets!) review.

Spanning ten years, in both the past and future, this coming of age story was enjoyable to read. The main character, Harry was not my most favorite character but I think that was the point. It was interesting to watch his hatred and discontent for his very problematic parents almost morph into his only qualities. He, more or less, became his parents despite all his best efforts. He was never happy with who he was and what he looked like and I'm not sure he ever did.

I don't know if I truly picked up on the satire claimed in the synopsis, but I found the book to be very timely due to the issues influencing the overall plot (race inequality and white power, the risk democracy is facing, climate change, immigration, responses to the pandemic). Perhaps it was more covert than in your face satire. Overall, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it.

This was my first book to read by Chinelo Okparanta but definitely not the last! What an amazing, beautifully written novel! Highly recommend this one!!

Harry Sylvester Bird was a fun read that was able to both satirize society and make me laugh while also provoking important thoughts and maybe starting some important discussions about the way the world works. I love a story that uses an unreliable narrator, and the narrator was very unlikeable, but it was such a unique way to have the unlikeable ignorant character tell the story. It was a perspective that I think really enhanced the story and the way that I read the story.
One thing I will say is that I don't really feel like the synopsis did a good job of preparing me for what the book was going to be, so if you read this book, be prepared to be a little surprised. I found the timing of the book to be a little strange and I couldn't make sense of the fact of this book also taking place in the distant future while also doing everything else that it was doing.
(3.5 stars rounded down)

Funny yet serious, this is an entertaining, unique read. It’s satire that is very timely and the author does not shy away from today’s issues especially related to race and white power. This novel is an highly original take on the coming-of-age novel. Our hero hates his parents and, in doing so, shows us all the ugly underbellies of our society in the most brash, outlandish, and often funny descriptions. The insights and commentary from this young man are often hilarious, and overall seem to come from a genuine place of trying to understand the world he is growing up into. He sounds real and I felt like I got a glimpse of the world from the perspective a Gen Zer.
This is a book that I really want to talk about with others. I don’t yet see reviews in Net Galley for me to get an idea of how others respond to it and I’m so curious to see how this book lands. It started off in a jokey jumpy tone that took me a while to get, but gradually it settled down and was easier to read. I’m not sure how the author did it, but the voice of the narrator seemed to mature as he graduated from high school and moved to NYC, attended college, met a girl, and got to travel. The perspective he portrays as a child seems so real as to how a young person might interpret events. He is such a sensitive soul, and I honestly grew to really root for him as a young white man trying to be the best human he can be. He is constantly learning and revising his past insensitivities and I got the impression that the end of this book is just the beginning.
I also love the romance angle. It was believable but as a reader I felt like I was missing out on the whole story in this relationship and others. There were some chapters where I felt like I’d been dropped into a scene without much preparation. I like when the author treats me as an intelligent reader so don’t usually have a problem filling in blanks but maybe I need to reread this book to ensure I did get it all! Maryam was an interesting character in her own right and her story and perspective definitely enhanced the story. I like how we get the idea that then do end up together and enjoyed the foreshadowing that allows me to believe that the ending doesn’t have to be the end for them.
I enjoyed the scenery also – Tanzania, Ghana and New York City as backdrops were fascinating. To see Tanzania through a child’s eye and then Ghana from an adult perspective showed me how our main character developed but still had a lot to learn.
There’s SO much to say about this book! Loved it overall and I’m still thinking about it weeks later. I think it will stay with me as I puzzle it all out.
Thanks to Mariner Books and Net Galley for the early review copy. This is a book that made me think and it will remain with me for a long time.