Pigeon English

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Harri was such a little charmer, so innocent and unaware of the very violent surroundings he and his family were living in. Armed with a pair of camouflage binoculars and detective techniques absorbed from television shows like CSI, Harri and his best friend, Dean, plot to bring the perpetrator to justice. After he is expelled from school, Jordan steals for the Dell Farm Crew in exchange for cigarettes and protection, starting the young boy down a path of juvenile delinquency. Instead, Pigeon English suggests that the immigrant experience involves contributing to the language, culture, and norms of one’s new home, thereby creating a new, hybrid culture. I also felt that the story was a little bit of a screen to educate the reader on the effect of poverty and violence on children and their families which weakened the overall power of the book.

The book is written in tiny bits and pieces switching from topic every few pages, matching the way of thought of the 11 year old main character. Alongside people with English heritage, Harri encounters other Ghanaian immigrants, Somalis, Pakistanis, Latvians, and others. It also highlights that even as signs proclaim to explicitly lay out the rules of a given culture, the reality is much more complex. Their mission (when not messing around playing Suicide Bomber, Zombie, or bugging the crap out of their sisters) is to solve the murder mystery and get reward money.That is the situation of Harrison “Harri” Opoku, the 11-y/o Ghanaian boy who goes to live in a housing settlement in London together with his mother and elder sister, Lydia. I found the Ghanaian-inflected English that peppers the book's description and dialogue (my favorite is the admonishment "advise yourself! Harri is an endearing and unfailing optimist with a wonderful sense of humour and delightfully ungrammatical English.

I felt no more empathy for these kids with nicknames like Killa and X-Fire than I did before reading the book. Similarly, the defaced sign shows that rules, expectations, and norms are established by authority figures (governments and business owners), as well as ordinary people. Recently emigrated from Ghana with his sister and mother to London’s enormous housing projects, Harri is pure curiosity and ebullience—obsessed with gummy candy, a friend to the pigeon who visits his balcony, quite possibly the fastest runner in his school, and clearly also fast on the trail of a murderer. About a third of the way in I just starting skipping the pigeon's narrative portions (which is easily done as they appear in italics).These words are also unfamiliar to a lot of British people not living in that area but there are so many accents and dialects in the UK - English is a less homogenous language than in the US maybe - that it doesn't really annoy anyone.

Pigeon English (which comes packaged with reading group discussion points such as "Has the novel in any way changed the way you think about youth gangs, knife crime or urban poverty? Newly-arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister Lydia, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of city life, from the bewildering array of Haribo sweets, to the frightening, fascinating gang of older boys from his school. That's when I knew why he sings louder than anybody else: it's because he's been waiting the longest for God to answer. But a warning - it might annoy some American readers with a lot of unfamiliar words and different accents.Together, the two of them investigate the murder of the dead boy, inspired by Dean’s love of the CSI television show.

Harri's surroundings bristle with half-understood menace, most obviously from the alcoholics, dealers, petty criminals and teenage members of the Dell Farm Crew gang who shadow the estate. It's a world in which conflict and aggression have been normalised; but through the exuberant naivety of Harri's voice, Kelman also insists that those are not its only elements, and not even its most important ones. An 11 year old refugee from Ghana moves to a poor neighbourhood in London UK and lives his life with his mother and sister while Dad and baby sister remain in Ghana. I'm trying to help you while I still can, I'm trying my best but there's only so much I can do from here […] Home will always find you if you walk true and taller than those weeds. He and his friends come upon a crime scene where an older teen boy is stabbed to death and the remainder of the book very loosely and sloppily becomes a bit of a comedic drama about his thinking processes, amateur sleuthing and his world views.I spat out the rest of my Atomic Apple Hubba Bubba for if I swallowed it by mistake and my guts all got stuck together. In this non-linear narrative, Harri includes memories of his life in Ghana, which seem to emphasize a past life of pure innocence, morality and simplicity in contrast to his London life, which continues to threaten to corrupt that innocence and good will. Harri begins investigating the dead boy's murder because he feels an inexplicable connection with the murdered teen. along with Harri's narrative, trying too hard to give extra dual-meaninged significance to the title (and draw allusion, maybe, to Jonathan Livingston Seagull).