Twain Book Club: EVERYWHERE YOU DON'T BELONG

Name: Twain Book Club: EVERYWHERE YOU DON'T BELONG
Start: 2025-01-06T18:30:00-06:00
End: 2025-01-06T19:30:00-06:00
Location: Twain: Missouri BBQ & Taproom

Schedule

Mon Jan 06 2025 at 06:30 pm to 07:30 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

Twain: Missouri BBQ & Taproom | Columbia, MO

Come and celebrate the arrival of the new year and join us in the always-hospitable surroundings of Twain Bar and BBQ on the first floor of the Tiger Hotel for an informal book discussion (with alcohol!) about a notable book with links to the Show-Me State. This month we’ll be reading and discussing Everywhere You Don’t Belong, the debut novel of Skylark favorite, Gabriel Bump. It’s a much-lauded book, and with very good reason - we all loved it. And part of the novel takes place in Columbia, Missouri!
In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn’t dangerous or brilliant—he’s an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home.

Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights–era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America.

Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don’t Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.