Daniel Karin
Boyhood
J.M. Coetzee

Boyhood is an ok book. It is about a boy’s child hood in South Africa. He talks about all of his experiences moving from town to town. The plot is not so interesting. And it gets slow at some parts of the book. The author also takes a while to tell you the main character’s name so it gets confusing a lot. But some parts are interesting. The author could have cut out some parts. It gives you a good mental vision of what living in South Africa would be like and what the people were like.

This book in the beginning is really confusing because the author doesn’t tell the main character’s name. He just refers to him as he so when the main character talks to someone else it’s just like he said this and then he said that back. So you can’t understand who is talking. He also doesn’t tell you what his parents’ names are. It is also slow when he talks about his mom’s bike and it’s for a full chapter in the beginning of the book. I didn’t get the bike thing with his mom. I think he can take out some of the parts where he starts talking about the farm a bike, or his birthday. Because he will continue to talk about it and it ends up being an entire chapter.

The theme of this book is about the childhood of the author who lives near Cape Town in South Africa. He is a boy who does well in school and gets straight A’s in all his classes. He is afraid of his teacher and that they will flog him or beat him and then he would have to commit suicide because he would have been embarrassed. At home he doesn’t respect his dad. He loves his mom a lot, but he always takes sides with his dad because he looks at him as the head of the family and he doesn’t want to get on his dads bad side. So if his dad starts making fun of his mom then he takes sides with his dad and joins in.

The writing style in Boyhood is suspenseful in a way because the author doesn’t tell you the names of the characters. It is very detailed because he tells you a lot about his birthday arguments, and school days. I liked that about the author’s writing, but it didn’t have to take up the entire chapter or twelve pages. The author talks about what the people are like and what the scenes looked like. So it was good in a way that he described how things look. I also thought it was kind of weird that he loved his mom a lot but he would always take sides with his dad even though he didn’t have respect for his dad. I thought that the author could have talked about that more, because I was a little confused.

Overall I thought this book was okay and that I would recommend it to someone that liked slow books. Even though it wasn’t that many pages long. But I did like how he described things and told you his secrets. The main thing I didn’t like was how the author waited till half way through the book to reveal the names of the main character and his family.