Book Review: Mendel
Mendel. Damone Bester, The Story Plant, 26 April 2022, Paperback, eBook, and Audiobook, 288 pages.
Reviewed by Barbara Belford.
Brandon James, or BJ as he’s called by friends and family, faces big challenges during his senior year at Mendel High School—challenges that threaten to destroy his relationships and his future. His mother’s unexpected death after doctors declared her surgery a success comes with the shock of seeing his estranged father at the hospital, who was incarcerated when BJ was nine. Now this man, whom BJ refuses to call dad, moves into the home they share with their aunt and takes over the responsibility of caring and providing for BJ and his younger sister.
BJ goes through the characteristic phases of grief but with the additional baggage of righteous anger at this Johnny-come-lately father. At the same time, he’s dealing with the pressure from his teachers to make college decisions to prevent him from becoming another statistic of the gun violence prevalent on Chicago’s Southside.
When given the task of cleaning the attic of his late mother’s possessions, BJ finds her journals, and as he reads, discovers she planned on being a track star until getting pregnant derailed her plans. BJ decides to honor her legacy by rejoining the Mendel track team, and this decision changes the trajectory of his life.
Between the comradery of his teammates, and the counsel of his coach, BJ opens his mind to accept that his father is trying to turn over a new leaf by disavowing old gang associations and attempting to bring peace to Roseland by training and mentoring gang members who want to abandon the lifestyle. Both his coach and his father help BJ see that allowing God to take control will give him the strength he needs to become a man who can face the difficulties of gang violence, new truths about his birth circumstances, and an uncertain college future. The mantra of BJ’s track team, “blue smoke,” steadies him as he walks the tightrope between loyalty and integrity.
The author’s narrative style of stream of consciousness pulled me right into the story, and I was immediately rooting for BJ to find an advocate to lean on during the difficulties he faced as such a young man. Because I live close to the South side of Chicago and have done extensive research in that area for one of my novels, I could picture many of the places in the book, which gave me the ability to make movies in my mind of BJ and how he navigated his Roseland world. The author has personal history at Mendel, the school his fictional character attends, as a student and on the track team, so that made the scenes in the book all the more real to me. Even though BJ encounters many terrible events, the undercurrent of this young adult novel is hope, a message much needed today.
Debut author Damone Bester has tackled some weighty subjects in this YA novel, and the only room for improvement might be some line editing and developmental and continuity revisions with an emphasis on creating more dialogue and action sequences rather than narrated exposition. I hope the “blue smoke” mantra of Damone Bester, a Mendel Monarch alum, will reach the next generation and inspire them to thrive, not just survive.