Free Burning: A Novel [Paperback]

Bayo Ojikutu (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2006

Tommie Simms was supposed to be the community hope, the young man from the neighborhood who made good. He attended a state university, married a respectable woman, and landed a position at a white-collar insurance firm. Watching over Chicago from the thirty-third floor of his company’s downtown high rise, Tommie ignores the gnawing sense that he doesn’t belong on this path—and that in a blink of an eye, he could stray from its given destination. And then he does . . .

Soon Tommie is laid off, and he begins to see himself as just another faceless entity on the city’s fringes. After each fruitless job interview, Tommie’s wife withdraws from him further, and in the mirror he faces
the reflection of failure his family never intended for him. Stymied by rejection and mounting debt, Tommie is seduced into peddling dope as his best opportunity to define himself and to provide for those he loves.

But a corporate job is no preparation for hustling, and when Tommie finds himself on the wrong side of a crooked cop, everyone wants a piece of him: his street-hustling cousins, the police, friends, loan sharks, even
a panderer from his white-collar past. In order to break free, Tommie must find a way to dig himself out of a deepening hole, before the city buries him.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Tommie Simms is going down the ladder faster than he went up in Ojikutu's second novel (after 47th Street Black). Pushed into college by his addict mother, Tommie finds success working at an insurance company. Living in Chicago's Four Corners neighborhood with wife Tarsha and their baby girl, post-9/11 layoffs hit and Tommie scrambles to find employment. He begins selling marijuana for his cousin Remi and, after his arrest by a corrupt white cop named Weidmann, Tommie arranges a meeting between Remi and Weidmann, who wants in on Remi's action. This infuriates Remi's partner and half brother, Westside Jack. Jack pressures Tommie into helping him set up Weidmann by secretly filming him having sex with an underage girl. Getting deeper into the Chicago underworld, Tommie struggles to find his place-does he belong in the working week or on the streets? Tommie's narration merges urban cynicism with a densely crosshatched, riffing style reminiscent of Leon Forrest. Tommie is a character mentally stuck between two worlds, and his stasis eventually infects the energy of the story, which doesn't resolve so much as wind down.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Ojikutu's award-winning debut, 47th Street Black (2003), set in African American Chicago during the 1960s, portrays a promising high-school athlete turned gangster. In his second psychologically intense novel of the cruel paradoxes of life in a poor black Chicago neighborhood, Ojikutu hones his gifts for taut drama, bitter irony, and the rapid-fire trading of insults that passes for conversation among men struggling to survive in a world dead-set against them. Tommie, married with a baby daughter, has finally broken free from the poverty that grips his South Side neighborhood. Then he loses his job with a downtown insurance firm in the wake of 9/11. Soon he's as desperate as the guys who mock him for being a college grad and turns to selling weed for his cousin Remi only to run afoul of a rogue cop and rival dealers. Ojikutu writes with fierce precision and strategic nuance, shaping this timeless tale of a good man trapped in hell into a blazing indictment of the multiplying injustices and hunkered-down hopelessness of this particular juncture of terror and greed. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 383 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press; First edition (October 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400082897
• ISBN-13: 978-1400082896
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,423,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brace yourself., March 6, 2008

By 

Billy Lombardo (Forest Park, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Free Burning: A Novel (Paperback)

In his second novel (his first was 47th Street Black Boy), Bayo Ojikutu explores one man's struggle to survive by dancing on the thin ice of the two worlds he inhabits. On one hand he is young black father and husband trying to survive amid the temptations of thugs and drugs on Chicago's south side, and on the other, he's a black college graduate trying to make it in a white man's world. You will struggle along with Tommie Simms and he interacts sweetly with his wife and child, and you will brace yourself, as well, against the fear, hopelessness, and injustice that await him around every street-lit corner.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars New Exploration of Staid Reality, January 3, 2008

By 

randemsefowt "Fred Towes" (Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Free Burning: A Novel (Paperback)

This is provocatively written fiction, and an intermittently interesting read. Reviews chronicled by Kirkus, Black Issues Monthly Book Review, Essence, the Miami Herald, and the critique written by Donna Seaman of Booklist seem to hit the work's merit in most apt fashion. BURNING is strong urban literature, a welcome reprieve from common guttural, oblivious and nonsensical takes on contemporary "Black life" -- but it surely is not a read well-suited to those seeking easy "alleluias", "amens" and "yes ma'ams".

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The story went no where, August 1, 2007

By 

V. Washington (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Free Burning: A Novel (Paperback)

This was a very dissappointing read. Although the characters were well crafted and clearly defined, there isn't a single likable person in the novel. Overall, the writing is good, but the subject matter and point of view is so depressing that you wondered why any of these people bother to get up in the morning. While I believe Bayo Ojikutu is a talented writer, this novel was just not my cup of tea. There was no point to the whole thing. No lessons learned, no moral; the story just ended in same place it began. I don't always need a happy ending, but I do need to feel like there was a point to the whole thing.