Out of shadows- Jason Wallace

Out of shadows; the title doesn’t prepare you for the horror of the book. The book is set in a boarding school at the end of a war with in the country now called Zimbabwe, where the whites are angry that they have been overthrown by the blacks and have lost their statues.

There are two main characters Robert and Ivan. Both completely different but both need of each other.

Robert, the main character and teller of the story, starts out as an impressionable boy, who befriends the only black kid in school Nelson, but the friendship is short lived as he joins Ivan and his gang of white children. Robert through the book goes through several changes and sometimes not for the best reasons.

Ivan is the villain of the story, not that I would call Robert the hero, but he isn’t a villain of his own choice. He has been raised in a state of constant racist hate and it has corrupted him, but he is still a caring boy, this is seen when the character Klompie is mentally traumatized due to his parents being brutally murdered before his very eyes. Ivan isn’t a character you set out to like but is one you grow to understand.

The plot is extremely gripping and I couldn’t put it down. But even as gripping as it was there were some places where I didn’t understand what was going on. This is probably due to the fact that I didn’t know what was going on during the time of Robert Mugabe, and I really didn’t care being a Pommie.

The style of writing is like that of an interview asking someone to revisit a certain situation, I loved it. But the way he wrote made it hard to understand the thought process that was going through the characters head.

In conclusion I loved the book; it was an excellent read full of emotion and gripping plot. I would recommend it to anyone and everyone.

Sofie Burrows JBI.