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A review by jmatkinson1
My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal
5.0
Leon is eight years old when his brother Jake is born. It is 1979 and Leon loves The Dukes of Hazard, Action Man and his brother. His Mum, Carol, is unstable so Leon and Jake are taken into care and placed with a foster mother, Maureen. Jake is blonde, blue-eyed baby and Social Services put him up for adoption, Leon is a mixed-race, troubled boy on the brink of adolescence and he is to stay with Maureen. Maureen becomes ill and Jake is moved to stay with her sister. Here he makes friends with the old men on the local allotments but Leon has a plan to reunite his family. Meanwhile racial tension is building in the area...
From the very first page this book had me hooked. Leon is such a sympathetic character, coping with his mother's mental illness and lifestyle, then being separated from his baby brother, a brother he had been the chief carer for. Against the backdrop of the social services system in the early 80s, separating the brothers was seen as logical. The fact that Leon is mixed race is not a tool for the plot to involve racial tension, it just seems completely natural. The secondary characters are also complex, Mr Devlin falsely thought to be a pervert, Tufty and Castro and the casual racism they encounter, Maureen a complete hero. The writing is clever, told from the point of view of an eight-year old but with enough insight to bring the larger political events to bear. this is a wonderful read.
From the very first page this book had me hooked. Leon is such a sympathetic character, coping with his mother's mental illness and lifestyle, then being separated from his baby brother, a brother he had been the chief carer for. Against the backdrop of the social services system in the early 80s, separating the brothers was seen as logical. The fact that Leon is mixed race is not a tool for the plot to involve racial tension, it just seems completely natural. The secondary characters are also complex, Mr Devlin falsely thought to be a pervert, Tufty and Castro and the casual racism they encounter, Maureen a complete hero. The writing is clever, told from the point of view of an eight-year old but with enough insight to bring the larger political events to bear. this is a wonderful read.