Hum If You Don't Know the Words

I won this in a Goodreads giveaway!!! I was hoping to finish this advanced copy before the publication date, but ... time got away from me.

To be perfectly honest, before picking up this book I could not have told you what apartheid was. I wish “Hum If You Don't Know The Words” had included a little more about the protests that were the impetus for this book, but I also get that telling the history was clearly not the purpose of the book, and so I'll need to go elsewhere to learn more.

I really did enjoy Hum. The writing was beautiful, and it was an easy book to get lost in. The intertwined stories of Robin and Beauty were engaging, all of the characters were well fleshed out, and there are a lot of big, heavy topics in this that seemed to be treated with care, overall. (This was something I was pretty darn worried about as I read, considering the blurb described this book as for being perfect for fans of The Help. Which, I'll admit, I really liked The Help back when I read it, but have since learned more about what made The Help problematic, and was desperately hoping this subject matter would be treated better. I don't think Hum was perfect, but I don't think it will have the same kind of backlash that The Help did either.)

My issues were:
1) It was hard to get a grasp on how old Robin was supposed to be. She was kind of all over the place. She was described as 9 and 10 as the book progressed, and I would expect a child that had experienced as much trauma as Robin had to act older than her age. However, sometimes she acted significantly younger than her age, and sometimes I had to check the dates at the top of the chapters to make sure that we hadn't jumped four years or something, because sometimes her insights and realizations seemed better suited to a teenager. However, I don't really know much about child development, so let's move on.

2) This took a turn towards caper-town. Which, admittedly, was fun to read, but we're talking race relations and children going (willingly?) into terrorist groups and people going missing, and it seemed almost absurd for our young protagonist to be having an adventure, pretending to be a spy in legitimately dangerous situations, escaping from “the bad guy,” saving the day. Which leads to...

3) Yeah. There's a little bit of white savior-ism at the end. And it was part of the aforementioned caper, and seemed super unlikely. Plus there was a bunch of stuff like Robin telling a room full of black people, “Look, I'm one of you! I wear a Free Nelson Mandela shirt! I know a few words of your language and I learned how to dance like you too!” and it was pretty cringe-worthy, but was followed up by some genuinely great dialogue about diversity and difference.

It seems like a lot of the reviewers were not happy with the way it ended, but I am glad that it wasn't completely wrapped up in a neat little package. Because life isn't.

And wow, this review got a little out of hand. I hope this stream-of-conscience was useful. I had feelings during this book, and I'm not entirely sure how I should process them, but I'd love to hear others' perspectives. I'll be thinking about this for a while.