Confrontations
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Confrontations
Narrated by:
Ella Dacres
Buy Now for £12.04
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Narrated by:
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Ella Dacres
A bold, unsettling, surprisingly tender debut novel for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Nightcrawling.
Salomé Atabong is the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Cameroonian father and a Dutch mother, living in the Netherlands. She arrives at a juvenile detention center to start a six-month sentence for a violent crime, which she did commit but does not regret. Expected to visit with a racist psychologist and perform her apologies, Salomé refuses to atone. But even if Salomé could get home, it would be no refuge: her father has recently been diagnosed with liver cancer, and her elder sister Miriam’s main preoccupation is to get out of the village as soon as possible.
After months in the prison system, she realizes she must come to terms with the real reason behind her rage.
Raw and unsentimental yet lyrical, Confrontations captures the paradoxical demands society makes on Black women, the way communities, schools, and the prison system perpetuate racism, and the cost of Black female defiance.
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Critic reviews
A short book, a compact explosive device, and a brisk eye-opening narrative . . . Atangana Bekono gives voice to the voiceless, but also exposes the moral rot and racist foundations of a society too complacent and oblivious to care.
A tightly wound, forcefully lyrical debut novel by an award-winning Dutch poet . . . A psychological mystery whose solution resides in self-discovery.
Salomé’s sharp, voice-driven narration captures the tedium and frustrations of her sentence as well as the depth of her adolescent angst. The slow revelation of Salomé’s crime maintains tension throughout. The final act, which chronicles her release, interweaves her feelings, thoughts, and memories from before and during her incarceration to skillfully portray the difficulty of returning to life on the outside. This one’s hard to put down.
Lyrical . . . perfect for readers who value in-depth characterization. Salomé struggles with the quirks of teenagehood, a troubled home life, and the politics of navigating a world where underlying racist views are treated as normal and acceptable. In her complex and intricate first novel, Atangana Bekono does a fantastic job of exploring the internal conflict of wanting to fit in while also hoping to hold society to account.
Deep and meditative, this book weaves through multiple themes to deliver a pinpoint gut punch to the reader.
This debut centers on a mixed heritage teenage girl in a juvenile detention center in the Netherlands [who] refuses to play the games of the racist, carceral system she must endure. Atangana Bekono handles violent content with care and explores themes of family, identity, carcerality and dreams.
Those who have lived under the ugly shadow of racial bullying know that words can hurt so much they break your mind, as is the case for Salomé . . . Short chapters mimic the distracted attention span of an intelligent and troubled teen . . . Like the corridors of the Donut that perpetually curve right, Salomé is trapped in a hostile world that points her in only one direction.
A sensitive, moving, and insightful story about an incarcerated teenage girl coming to terms with her social identity, self-understanding, and dreams. The writing captures, believably, the thoughts of a young person facing the devastation of her confinement and what led up to it. Oscillating between unfiltered expression and philosophical realization, and with moments of utter beauty, Atangana Bekono captures the anguish of degradation, the desperation of rage, and the loneliness of Salomé’s experience at the margins of two cultures.
In the pages of Simone Atangana Bekono's daring, beautifully-written and incredibly observant novel, Confrontations, you'll meet the main character, Salomé, who pays a high price for standing up for herself and the people she loves. Each of Atangana Bekono's characters are drawn with so much acuity and honesty. I love this page turner and the colorful cast of characters who populate it.
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