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ClareR (5779 KP) rated Fire Rush in Books

May 11, 2023  
Fire Rush
Fire Rush
Jacqueline Crooks | 2023 | Contemporary, Fiction & Poetry
10
10.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
This is an incredible debut novel. Yamaye is a young black woman who is immersed in the Dub music scene of the 1970s and 1980s. She spends her free time clubbing at The Crypt (it really is a crypt) where Dub music is the music that young black people all want to listen and dance to. Yamaye works so that she can go clubbing and buy the clothes that she wants to wear there (which all sound very cool, by the way).

But there’s a cloud that hangs over Yamaye’s life. Her mother left when she was young, and she has been raised by a father who seems thoroughly heartbroken by his wife’s departure. There’s also the spectre of racism and police brutality looming over her. Yamaye becomes involved in police brutality protests, and then becomes embroiled in a gang in Bristol, leaving London and her troubles there behind. Or so it seems, because it looked to me like she was just swapping one set of problems for another.

I loved this book, and I wish that it had come with a playlist on Spotify (the actual book may well have a playlist, but I read the NetGalley download) - but never fear! I went looking myself, and was ably assisted by my 16 year old drumming mad son. Now he LOVED the music, and regularly drums along to these new bands and songs that he has discovered for himself.

This is an engaging, exciting story with a vibrancy through its descriptions of inner London as much as those of rural Jamaica. The Jamaican patois was for me the icing on the cake. It made such a distinctive voice (quite literally!), and I soon fell into it’s rhythms.

It’s a book that reminded me of how I felt about music as a young woman (ok, it was different music, but still!) and how it crept into everything in my life.

Themes include: race, misogyny, police violence, oppression of people of colour, gangs, the legacy of slavery, music and belonging. At least these are the themes that I could pick out!

It’s an amazing book - just read it!
  
I found Start Here to be very inspirational. The Harris’ get down to the point quickly and concisely.

Start Here is a light easy read, but then how can a Christian living book be light? They talk about pride and sin and giving glory to God, they talk about peer pressure and stress and fears and the Father of Lies. But they also encourage teenagers to get out of the box that our society has put them in. It’s light and easy in that it’s an easily understood page-turner.

The Harris’ first book, Do Hard Things, was about encouraging teens to do just that—to do hard things—for God. In Start Here, they talk about how to go about doing those hard things, what to do when you encounter fear, press, or peer pressure, and answer all the tough questions.

One of the points that they make is that your hard thing may not be to sail around the world at age sixteen or to make a movie or to start a nonprofit organization or anything else big. Your hard thing might be what some people consider a small thing, and it may be something that nobody even knows about. But God wants you to do that hard thing because in the long run, it changes your heart for the better. At the back of Start Here is a list of 100 things that people have contributed too, and I want to share a few with you:

Sold all the clothes I didn’t need and gave the money to charity
worked up to 100 pushups in four weeks
saved my first kiss for my wedding day
read a book out loud to my younger siblings
let my brother win an argument
Babysat for a single mom who could not pay me much
Set a budget and stuck with it.
Maybe these people aren’t going to be front page news… but their hard things are pretty important.

Start Here will encourage, inspire, and help you through whatever it is that God has for you, whether you know about it right now or not. Consider it a handbook, and use it side by side with your main instruction manual (The Bible).

Recommendation: Ages 11+ Adults do hard things, too! They also will benefit from this book.

(book provided for review by publisher)