Book 75 - One of Them by Musa Okwonga

Reading date  - April 2021

I will begin this review by copying the following from the description of the book: 

"Woven throughout this deeply personal and unflinching memoir of Musa’s five years at Eton in the 1990s is a present-day narrative which engages with much wider questions about pressing social and political issues: privilege, the distribution of wealth, the rise of the far right in the UK, systemic racism, the ‘boys’ club’ of government and the power of the few to control the fate of the many. One of Them is both an intimate account and a timely exploration of race and class in modern Britain."

What I expected from this book is not what I got from it.  For some reason, I thought this would be a biography of Musa's life, from birth to modern day.  I should have paid more attention to what the description said.

This book is brilliant, Musa has a skill where he writes about the everyday and mundane (to him) in a way which makes reading about it an absolute joy.  I feel my eyes just running along the lines absorbing the words.  The book starts with a basic description of Musa's life, how he ended up in the UK and his set-up here.  I grew up a few stops down the line from where Musa grew up and I have been to the area where Musa lived as a child so was semi familiar with what he was going from, and to.

The book does exactly what it says, it tracks Musa's journey to Eton, from seeing it on tv, to going to prep school and finally to Eton.  This is a book which touches on every aspect of his life, it is about Eton, how he fared there, how he came home and welded both lives together.

Musa explains the various systems within Eton, the type of people he studied with and of course, how he, like most of us, were bullied for short periods.  

Links are made between the past and the future at all times throughout this book in a way which is informative but not at all over the top and repetitive.