Kieron Smith, Boy (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: maw gived, wee ferry, complete darling, Uncle Billy, Auntie May, John Davis (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kieron Smith's coming-of-age in a rough Glasgow neighborhood is grimly rendered by Kelman in this stark and affecting novel. The younger of two boys, Kieron is overlooked and seen as simple compared to his brother, Matt, the smart one. Kieron's only safe haven is his grandparents' house, where his grannie treats him as the favorite and his granda and uncle teach him to fight (Uncle Billy suggests Kieron use a brick against larger bullies). But when the family moves across town to a better neighborhood, Kieron falls in with a group of rowdy youth from his new primary school, including Mitch, an angry, abused child, and he takes to climbing drainpipes and scampering across rooftops as an outlet for his frustrations. As the years tick by, Kieron's relationships with his family disintegrate (things with Matt get especially bad), and Kelman's raw, blunt narration drives home all of Kieron's loneliness, sadness and feelings of inadequacy. If you can roll with the Scots dialect, the narrative is rewarding, bleak and marvelous. (Nov.)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Glasgow, like Belfast across the Irish Sea, has never been an easy town to love. Second cities -- think Chicago -- rarely are. Ugly-duckling cousins of their respective national capitols, Glasgow and Belfast were mostly Victorian creations, proud of their shipbuilding, proud of their soot. At least until the ships, the soot and the pay packets went somewhere else. In Kieron Smith, Boy, James Kelman's splendid evocation of childhood in mid-20th-century Glasgow, the title character is a boy who does not know a great deal. But what he does know he knows very well. And one thing he knows for certain is who's a Prod (Protestant) and who's a Pape (Catholic). Like Belfast, Glasgow was always a town with a sectarian divide wide enough to march an Orange parade through. Kieron earns pocket money by climbing drainpipes and breaking into houses for housewives who've left without their keys. He loves and resents an older brother, a snobby mother and a father with quick fists. He endures a challenging, painful transition from familiar streets to a new-fangled housing project, and he develops an ethical sense along with an enduring fascination for lasses, ships, telly and a beloved ex-boxer grandfather. This boy's story is told entirely from his point of view and in his voice, tuned to the hard, sharp speech of Glasgow's working-class ghettos: "Podgie could sink ye with one punch. I would not care. If it was a bottle, I would batter him with it because if it was yer sister ye were no going to let that happen. I would not be feared of him." This kind of thing could start sounding like Glaswegian faux-Faulkner in the hands of a writer less aurally gifted. Instead, Kelman, who won the Booker Prize for another Glasgow novel, How Late It Was, How Late (1994) uses Kieron's stylized, wise-child speech to economically assemble a particular world. It reminded me of Linda Manz's voice-over in Terrence Malick's epic film "Days of Heaven," which was the lyric thread that sewed the pieces of that narrative together. As an urban coming-of-age, the novel also reminded me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith's enduring evocation of an unloved girl's adolescence. This funny, sad and deeply entrancing novel works as dreams do: by seduction, by raising strange spirits, and by delivering a world entire. It represents a triumph for Kelman, as hard and uproarious as a Glasgow Saturday night.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (November 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151013489
• ISBN-13: 978-0151013487
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #268,962 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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