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What happens when Shakespeare’s Othello is transposed to a suburban Washington middle school in the 1970s? Let’s find out.
New Boy by Tracy Chevalier
Thursday May 26th at 8pm on Zoom
DM us or contact christine@shakespeareintheruff.com for the Zoom link. (Don’t have time to read the book but still interested in the conversation? Join us anyway!)
New Boy is available at Queen Books (10% off with the code RUFFREADS), the Toronto Public Library, as an audiobook, and as an e-book.
From the Publisher:
“O felt her presence behind him like a fire at his back.”
Arriving at his fourth school in six years, diplomat’s son Osei Kokote—“O” for short—knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day, so he is lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one boy, used to holding sway in the world of the schoolyard, can’t stand to witness the budding relationship. When Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl, the school and its key players—teachers and pupils alike—will never be the same again.
The tragedy of Othello is vividly transposed to a 1970s suburban Washington school, where kids fall in and out of love with each other before lunchtime, and practice a casual racism picked up from their parents and teachers. The world of preadolescents is as passionate and intense, if not more so, as that of adults. Drawing us into the lives and emotions of four eleven-year-olds—Osei, Dee, Ian and his reluctant girlfriend Mimi—Tracy Chevalier’s powerful drama of friends torn apart by love and jealousy, bullying and betrayal, is as moving as it is enthralling. It is an unforgettable novel.
Tracy Chevalier is best known for her historical novels, including the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring and, most recently, At the Edge of the Orchard. She is also editor of Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has honorary doctorates from her alma maters Oberlin College and the University of East Anglia. She lives with her family in London.