Country: USA
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 527 Kb (eOriginal)
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But they were past that. Had Cindy shot an unarmed Adem, Bleeker wouldn't have hesitated to take out Mustafa had he come after his own justice. Family, right? Fuck justice.
I have grown slightly obsessed about the fiction of Anthony Neil Smith over the last few months. Since last March (when I discovered him), I have read all of his novels, except for the first one PSYCHOSOMATIC. I was very happy when I learned that his latest, ALL THE YOUNG WARRIORS, would be published by Blasted Heath, the new kid in town, in terms of ePublishing. It was announced by the writer (and everybody else who had read it) as a departure from his usual style, which had me worried a little. I like Smith's style. He's a man who has a demon living inside him and when he lets this demon tell the stories, we get book like HOGDOGGIN' and CHOKE ON YOUR LIES, which both rank as some of my best reading in 2011.
It's quite the ballsy choice of story to begin with. The action begins as two Minnesotan cops pull a car on a traffic stop and get in a deadly shootout with the occupants. Two Somalian kids, named Jibrill and Adem. They are on their way to the airport to go join the rebel army in Somalia, where they think they belong after being brainwashed by an Imam named Rockstar Muhammad. One of the two cops shot happened to be Ray Bleeker's girlfriend. He left his wife after making his colleague pregnant and now that she and her baby are both dead, he doesn't have anything to hold on to, but to find the culprits. Savvy with the Somalian diaspora, Bleeker finds Adem's father Mustafa, who used to be a gangbanger and teams up with him to go and find the kids. As I'm typing it down, I'm realizing that it's quite the complex story, but I'm just giving you the jist of it.
The chapters are separated in two points of view. Bleeker and Mustafa and Jibrill and Adem, in Somalia. When I say it's quite the ballsy choice of story, it's that not only Anthony Neil Smith is commenting on a conflict nobody wants to end, but ALL THE YOUNG WARRIORS is also commenting on Americanization. For people like Somalians, who come from a culture where everything is so radically different, through the eyes of Adem, Smith is showing how hard it is to go back to where you come from after knowing America. Jibrill and Adem being two different examples, one adapted to the U.S and the other never did. Here's an example, also showing the typical music of Smith's writing, where the beauty appears when the sentences adn the ideas are crashing one into another.
In less than a week, Jibrill had grown from a boy with ADD to a respected man above men right in front of Adem's eyes. No one event or moment. The entire experience seemed to lift him. He was made for this.
I really liked ALL THE YOUNG WARRIORS. I didn't go crazy about it like I did for some of his older books, but it's a courageous novel that raises a lot of pertinent questions. No, Anothony Neil Smith's inner writing demon is not present on the pages, but he tried to do something different and I respect that. It's a novel about characters who lost the cornerstones of their identity while getting sucked in one of the ugliest conflict on Earth these days. It's a thriller, meant to reach a wider audience, so Smith left some of his endearing anger on the side for this one. The more I think about ALL THE YOUNG WARRIORS, the more I like it. You should give it a try, it's a good introduction to the work of the very talented Anthony Neil Smith.