Book: My Name is Leon
Author: Kit de Waal
Publisher: Viking
Price: £10.99
Review by Reshma Ruia
Kit De Waal’s debut novel My Name is Leon deserves its critical acclaim and place on the Sunday Times bestseller list.
This is a novel full of compassion, honesty and emotion. The book is about a child Leon who is separated from his mother and younger brother, and his attempts to be reunited with them and make sense of his broken world.
Leon is the main narrator and we see the events unfold through his nine year old self. He is brave and determined, with flashes of loneliness and fear and an uncanny ability to understand the adult world with its double-speak hypocrisy and “pretend” faces.
De Waal’s portrayal of a boy who is childlike yet possesses a sense of world-weariness and wisdom is excellent. The best passages of the book revolve around his longing for his mother and his efforts to be brave.
De Waal uses simple, direct and unpretentious language to portray the bleakness of a world of council housing, single parenting and family life quietly imploding under the stress of poverty, drugs and uncertainty. Yet, this is also a novel of hope and joy and kinship.
The book celebrates the pleasure found in little acts of kindness and the selflessness of the foster carers, unsung heroes who try and mend broken childhoods as best as they can. Leon’s foster carer Maureen is unforgettable with her natural instinct for love and a partiality for cakes.
There are other characters in the book that will stay with the reader long after the novel is finished, such as Tufty, a West Indian man who is passionate about his allotment and is protective of Leon.
My Name is Leon is much more than a story of a childhood. Set in eighties Britain, it’s also a snapshot of an era when race relations were at breaking point, with heavy handed policing and widespread looting and rioting. It also provides a human face to bland statistics on single families, fostering and fractured family lives.