Auf ein Miniaturbild klicken, um zu Google Books zu gelangen.
Lädt ... Pigeon English (2011. Auflage)von Stephen Kelman
Werk-InformationenPigeon English von Stephen Kelman
Lädt ...
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. What a damn heartbreaker! The story such with me for several days after reading - I adore Harri! Kelman gives Harri a distinctive voice and one cannot dislike the character and his relationships with loved ones. The book is more relevant now than ever - given the events that occur all over the UK every week (it seems, avoiding spoilers obviously). If you are precious about appropriation of language and "stereotypes" then give it a miss. This isn't for you and to be frank I'd prefer people not pull it down with current ideologies of what is and isn't "okay" (this was written 13 years ago, things change and we evolve). Another from the Booker Short list, Pigeon English is Stephen Kelman's first novel. The book is about Harri, an 11 year old Ghanaian boy living in London. Harri and his friend are investigating a local murder, after seeing the aftermath. Harri tells us about his life, family, school,, the local gangs and other neighbourhood characters. He also tells us about his relationship with a pigeon that is his favourite bird. This book reminded me a lot of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, with the motif of the little boy investigating a crime. I've seen people compare it to Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha as well, and Harri's naive observations of life do remind me of that book. Kelman based this book on an actual case, although that's only referred to tangentially in the acknowledgements at the end. Another very good book; I'd probably have this as second to Hilary Mantell so far. I brought this home from the library because of the description of the 2 characters - a boy from Ghana in London and a pigeon - but when I looked more closely the real focus of the book is a South London housing estate so I started off a bit on the wrong foot. I did like it - I enjoyed the speech of all the people in the book which really brought it to life - but got a bit impatient about half way through. By the time I had ploughed through the middle I was really worried about how he was going to wrap it up - but the very end was as good as the very beginning.
Pigeon English is indeed a very impressive debut...Pigeon English has a fresh, undeniable appeal, but Kelman doesn’t entirely knock it out of the park. Plotting gets swept aside for long stretches in order to focus on the coming-of-age aspect of the novel, and Harri’s charm-assault eventually begins to flag. Italicized monologues from a kind of “spirit pigeon”— Harri’s favourite bird — feel contrived. Kelman clearly has the instinct and the skills for future greatness. If this book doesn’t make him The Next Big Thing, there’s a good chance his next one will. Pigeon English does an admirable job of revealing the frightened teenage boys behind gang members' tough façades. But it is too conscious of the gulf between its subjects and its inevitably middle-class readers to be truly convincing. It is bad form to be rude about first novels, and a pleasure to praise them. Stephen Kelman’s has a powerful story, a pacy plot and engaging characters. It paints a vivid portrait with honesty, sympathy and wit, of a much neglected milieu, and it addresses urgent social questions. Stephen Kelman's debut is sympathetic if overhyped portrait of the frightened boys behind Peckham's gangs....It's called the murder weapon." Kelman has already been much praised for his ability to write from an 11-year-old's perspective, but here, as often in the first half of the novel, Harri's voice feels laboured and faux-naïf.....Pigeon English (which comes packaged with reading group discussion points such as "Has the novel in any way changed the way you think about youth gangs, knife crime or urban poverty?") does an admirable job of revealing the frightened teenage boys behind gang members' tough façades... Gehört zu VerlagsreihenA tot vent (631) Auszeichnungen
Lying in front of Harrison Opuku is a body, the body of one of his classmates, a boy known for his crazy basketball skills, who seems to have been murdered for his dinner. Armed with a pair of camouflage binoculars and detective techniques absorbed from television shows like CSI, Harri and his best friend, Dean, plot to bring the perpetrator to justice. They gather evidence-fingerprints lifted from windows with tape, a wallet stained with blood-and lay traps to flush out the murderer. But nothing can prepare them for what happens when a criminal feels you closing in on him.Recently emigrated from Ghana with his sister and mother to London?s enormous housing projects, Harri is pure curiosity and ebullience-obsessed with gummy candy, a friend to the pigeon who visits his balcony, quite possibly the fastest runner in his school, and clearly also fast on the trail of a murderer.Told in Harri's infectious voice and multicultural slang, Pigeon English follows in the tradition of our great novels of friendship and adventure, as Harri finds wonder, mystery, and danger in his new, ever-expanding world. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
Aktuelle DiskussionenKeineBeliebte Umschlagbilder
Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
Bist das du?Werde ein LibraryThing-Autor. |
Spoiler alert.....
this story does not end well. I recently read swamplandia and Mr. Pip. It seems that somehow if you rape or murder a child in your book, that will raise it in the eyes of the world to art.Count me out
( )