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Devastating in its quiet truth, “Brother” is a book about love, about hope, about wanting the best for your family and the future, and the insurmountable odds that may make the ordinary, the safe, and the comfortable completely out of reach.
Michael and his brother, Francis, live with their single mother Ruth (a native of Trinidad) in a low-rental tenement situated in an Eastern suburb of Toronto, Canada. Ruth works multiple minimum-wage jobs, navigating with bone-weary familiarity a public transport system that necessitates long hours away from home. The boys learn to fend for themselves, – Francis growing up with an outward swagger calculated to repel and defend, while Micheal, softer and less street-wise, follows in his shadow, providing the story’s narration with a raw vulnerability that is hard to remain untouched by.
“I was smaller than him, of course, but I was also somehow less of a proper presence.”
As the story slowly comes to spill over into two separate timelines, loosely dissected as the before-and-after of a tragedy which is carefully unraveled, it becomes clear that both boys love and support their proud mother, and each other, with a fierce tenderness that is revealed only through subtle gestures, heart-breaking in the rawness of their boyish ache to protect.
Ultimately, and not surprisingly, without giving the plot away, (no spoilers here), it also becomes clear that there may be no true opportunity for this small family to emerge unscathed from the combined and debilitating effect of the toughness of the neighbourhood, the criminality, gangs, poverty, discrimination, politics and policing-style rampant in the eighties (and unfortunately still, beyond).
As we come to care for these characters, their plight becomes our own, the author painstakingly revealing a world as beautifully emotionally textured as it is devastating, pulling us entirely into the core of a family and their cultural context, as real to us as the story on these pages portrays it.
I loved this book and these brave and not-yet-completely broken characters, and will definitely look for more to read from this wonderful author. All thoughts presented are my own.
