This novel opens in 1978 at a time when, with good reason, black people have no faith in the police and the South London community is suffering the pressures which will eventually lead to the major inner-city riots of 1981. Yamaye and her friends Asase and Rumer are three young black girls living for music, dancing and excitement.
They dress up, go to clubs and meet men like any young girls might but this is within the black subculture of the period where the bcommunity feels threatened and forges its own identity in music, drugs and, sometimes, violence. It's a wild and hedonistic ride but, along the way, Yamaye finds Moose and falls in love. It's a temporary happiness and a sequence of disasters leaves Yamaye in hiding and exploited. She escapes and, eventually, makes her way to Jamaica and, later, finds some kind of contentment.
It's a difficult book to review because the story is steeped in a culture and language which you have to believe is authentic. The telling is free-flow with DJ asides, lyrics and a haze of drugs but, at times, it seems almost a caricature of black life where the members of the Jamaican community don't work, hate the police, are constantly harassed, do a lot of drugs and live for music and dancing.
Maybe it was like that. Who knows? I just wasn't quite convinced.
(Fire Rush is published by Jonathan Cape. Thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for an advance copy.)
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