Prepare to fall in love with Harri, the middle-school student and immigrant who has wound up with his mother and sister Lydia in the London projects while his father and baby sister remain behind in Ghana until the family can raise the money for their passage to the Western world. You won't be able to resist Harri's fresh voice and his open heart. He adores that baby sister, Agnes (their phone conversations are a treat); loves treats like gummis and ice cream; and has the crushes and loyalties and worries of any tween, anywhere.
Unfortunately for Harri (full name: Harrison Opuku), the things he worries about in his life on the socioeconomic fringes of urban life aren't the things that actually threaten him. When he and his friend Dean discover, through their very amateur sleuthing, that a friend's death might be a murder, they put themselves in the path of far more sophisticated and nefarious local gang members.
As Harri wends his way through daily life, with talk of the right sort of trainers (athletic shoes), homework assignments and local characters like "Terry Takeaway," his "pidgin" slang ("bo-styles" for fashionable, "huitious" for formidable and so on) is occasionally interrupted by real "pigeon English": interludes in which a local pigeon makes portentous announcements about Harri's situation. These sections might annoy a reader--or they might provide a welcome change in perspective, illustrating how Kelman, in his debut novel, is providing a slice of life, a look down from above at an innocent below. Harri is the sparrow who falls, but in writing about his brief and lovely life, Kelman and his avian Cassandra makes sure that it is not without our knowledge. --Bethanne Patrick, editor, Shelf Awareness for Readers