Book Review: Everywhere You Don’t Belong

Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump. Yes, I took this picture outside, because it’s written by a Chicago author and I finished it during my first Chicago snow storm!

I initially added Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump to my TBR list after The New York Times included it on its list of the 100 best books of 2020. I moved back to Chicago recently (after growing up in the area then moving away after high school), so The Times’ s blurb about the novel being set on the South Side caught my eye.

Like many people who grew up in the northern Chicago suburbs, I’ve never been to the South Side. As a kid, I grew up not knowing much about it. Every once in a while, I’d hear warnings about gang violence and my parents would mention in passing that people on the South Side liked the White Sox instead of the Cubs. In high school, when I started keeping up with the news, I read regular headlines about gun violence and crime in that part of the city.

That’s pretty much all I knew about the South Side before I started reading Everywhere You Don’t Belong. For most of my life, growing up in homogeneously white parts of the Chicago area, the South Side felt like a part of the world that was geographically close, but metaphorically pretty far, from my own experience. Because of that, Bump’s novel offered me a valuable window into what life is really like there.

Everywhere You Don’t Belong is a coming-of-age story about a boy named Claude who grows up in South Shore, which is a predominantly black neighborhood in the South Side. Claude’s childhood is a series of comings and goings. His parents abandon him at a young age, and he’s raised by his grandmother and her friend Paul. New friends move to the neighborhood and then their parents whisk them away. He meets a girl named Janice at school who is being raised by her aunt and uncle. After a riot breaks out in the neighborhood, resulting in her uncle’s death, Janice’s aunt abandons her too. She moves in with Claude and his grandmother.

The riot is a pivotal moment in this novel. It starts after police kill an innocent child in South Shore. A crowd gathers around the crime scene — grieving neighbors, Claude, Janice, Janice’s aunt and uncle, and members of the Redbelters gang. Big Columbus, the gang leader, calls on his community to take a stand against the police violence. “Brothers and sisters,” he says, “Take back your sidewalk. Take back your pride” (74).

In a vivid scene, the neighbors start picking sides. Some stand behind Big Columbus and the Redbelters. Others try to go behind the cops, but are blocked from doing so, and then move to stand behind the gang. Eventually, just Claude is left alone in the middle, trapped “between two violent wrongs. There was no available peace” (76). Soon after, the standoff turns into a full blown riot that lasts for days and results in 26 deaths.

Claude standing alone among people he doesn’t identify with is a key theme throughout this story. A few years after the riot, determined to get out of Chicago, convinced the rest of the country must be different, he says goodbye to his grandma, Paul, and Janice, and heads to the University of Missouri. Yet, instead of finding a new home in Missouri, Claude feels homesick, defined by his race, and out of place. When he says he’s from Chicago, people in his dorm tell him he’s just like Obama. When he gets a job at the school paper, the editor puts him and the only other Black student on staff in charge of the diversity beat. Throughout all of this, he constantly misses Janice, who stayed behind in Chicago.

Before reading this book, I had a very limited understanding of the South Side. Everywhere You Don’t Belong gave me a nuanced image. It taught me much more about many of the challenges and tragedies of life in South Shore. And, importantly, it also showed me the joys and the everyday occurrences you never read about in the newspaper. 

You can buy Everywhere You Don’t Belong here.

Rating: 3 stars

Rating Scale:
5 Stars: I love this book!!!
4 Stars: Pretty good
3 Stars: Good
2 Stars: Not for me
1 Star: Truly dislike