Review: Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera

Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera
Goodreads | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble
YA, Contemporary, 352 pages, Puffin

• Series: Stand-alone
• Pub date: February 5 2009
• Why I read it: Hype, cover love, current events
• Disclosure: Received a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley. Thanks!

Judged by its cover:  Amazing. Gritty and relevant to the story, love the font, and perfectly suitable to read in public so that everyone knows that you are Highly Intelligent and care a lot about Issues...if you, erm, care about that sort of thing.

Goodreads blurb:

Khalid, a 15-year-old Muslim boy from Rochdale, is abducted from Pakistan while on holiday with his family. He is taken to Guantanamo Bay and held without charge. An innocent denied his freedom at a time when Western boys are finding theirs, Khalid tries and fails to understand what's happening to him and cannot fail to be a changed young man.

The Long...

I came into this book fully prepared for loving and was left disappointed. I do not take kindly to be disappointed. So I'm sorry if my bitterness shines through.

We start in the UK, where every effort is made to portray Khalid as an ordinary boy, with ordinary friends, who likes to play not-so-ordinary video games. Very elaborate misunderstandings with certain governments ensue, and already the reader is a little dazed by the backstory Perera throws at them. There are endless prison transfers and endless other prisoners and endless prison guards, portrayed always, always in black and white instead of the shades of gray that always dominate shady politics. Khalid is obsessed with the beautiful girl he left back home; she pulls him through. There is a drawn-out ending that beats the reader with its lofty messages until we feel black and blue.

Roll credits.

I tried to love this one. I really did. Like I said, I came into it with exceptionally high hopes. A teen novel about Guantanamo Bay, one of the most disturbing and riveting human rights incidents in my country's history? What could go wrong?

Unfortunately, what always seems to go wrong when authors set out to tell a Message instead of a Story: constant nobility and morality gets boring. There's no authenticity. And the book drags on.

There are a number of excellent moments, such as when Khalid realizes that your ideas of people rarely match up to your realities, especially when it comes to the people you think you're in love with. But they hardly outweigh the bloated and frustrating wasted potential of the rest of the book.

...and the Short: 

The author seems to have set out to tell a Message instead of a Story, and in so doing wasted a lot of narrative potential. Still a few moments worth reading, but mostly it's a frustrating mess.

The Final Word: Meh.