The beast of Kukuyo

I chose The Beast Of Kukuyo from NetGalley because of Hosein's Trinidadian nationality (one for my WorldReads) and because of the novel's eyecatching cover design. I expected to read a murder mystery but, other than a young girl being discovered dead near the beginning of the story, this novel veers far away from that usual genre fare. Instead we are shown the darkness of life in Kukuyo village, a community blighted by senseless violence, alcoholism and, most strikingly, by a lack of hope. The people of Kukuyo aren't particularly different from people anywhere else, yet their poverty and the squalor of their surroundings dictate how little they can be expected to achieve in their lives. The eponymous Beast Of Kukuyo might be Dumpling Heera's murderer, but I felt it more strongly to be the metaphorical black cloud perpetually hanging over the village.

That paragraph makes The Beast Of Kukuyo sound a depressing novel when in fact it is anything but. Our narrator, Rune, is vivacious and determined, with a strong stubborn streak and I liked her a lot. Raised along with her delinquent brother by their grandfather, she is starkly aware of being excluded from the community because of her darker skin colour and at the beginning of the novel this is a painful truth for Rune to acknowledge. As she becomes ever more aware of other families' lives though, she begins to understand how their spite isn't directed exclusively her way, and that their bullying attitudes are more a way to hide their internal pain. Hosein's characters are all damaged to some extent. Violent parents, manipulative 'friends', prostitutes and fully-fledged gangsters leap vividly from these pages and I got scarily authentic images of this village and its inhabitants. The murder mystery storyline is usually Rune's focus, but flows as an undercurrent through the novel as other events take over leaving Dumpling apparently forgotten.

I didn't really realise that this is intended as a young adult novel until I came to be writing up this review. The story deals with adult issues, although without portraying anything in an overly graphic way, and, as a forty-something reader, I certainly appreciated the tale and Hosein's evocative prose. Perhaps the narrative line wasn't quite distinct enough in places for my taste and it took me a little while to get into the story, however once I was hooked, I didn't want to cease reading!