Review: The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini

I get out of the car. I have eyes. I must see what cannot be seen. What once was.
The Boy Next Door – Irene Sabatini

Breathe in. And out. Where do I begin with this review?

I received this book from Hachette Book Group; I’ll start there. It sat on my bookcase for a while before I was ready to pick it up; it was intimidating and large and serious looking and I knew I needed to be ready for it. I started it, and fifty pages in I stopped and restarted it, and I’m glad I did. Restarting it allowed me to settle in with the narrative voice, it let me be fully familiar with Lindiwe and the way she uses memories to fill in the past so I can understand what makes the present so profound. The Boy Next Door is epic. It spans decades. It follows Lindiwe from adolescence through her transformation into a woman. She is fourteen when the novel starts, and her seventeen year old neighbor has been arrested for lighting his stepmother on fire. That’s how the novel starts. But that’s not where it stays. It follows Lindiwe and her neighbor, Ian, through post-independant Zimbabwe; through race tensions and revolutionary riots; through love ,and loss, and danger.

Part One begins in the 1980s. Lindiwe is a young girl,  shy, surrounded by racism and a country in transformation. Ian seems worldly to her, having been released from prison and returned to Bulawayo. They form an unlikely friendship, secret from the world. They are pulled together by an inexplicable bond that lasts through war and riots and years apart.

Part Two, the early 90s, finds Lindiwe grown into a young woman, attending school, with a bright future. Her childhood crush develops into something mature and deep, but there is an overhanging sense of unease in Sabatini’s writing; as though we know this happiness between Ian and Lindiwe cannot possibly last and be peaceful for the next two-hundred pages.

Part Three, the mid 90s becomes quick and tense. Revolutionary turmoil abounds, people are killed and murdered, and violence surrounds our characters. The tension continues into the late 90s in Part Four. It peaks and I was left breathless waiting for the end. There is so much more I could write, but it would spoil the novel and you really need to read it and experience it first-hand to understand the magnificence this story.

Sabatini’s debut novel is intense and beautiful and artistic. She captures Bulawayo and other places in Zimbabwe and the places become characters in her writing: living breathing, forming new stories. The relationship she paints between Ian and Lindiwe is enormous and tragic and joyous all at the same time, it flows up and down with a life of its own, and we’re taken along in the rapids and cannot escape. We could hardly wish to.

This novel was a debut novel, and it was truly wonderful. I had tears in my eyes. I suspect we’ll all be hearing about Irene Sabatini in the future.

4 stars