I read about Disgruntled earlier this summer, when both Jenny at Reading the End and Jenna at Lower East Side Librarian posted about it, and I’m glad I read their posts and then checked this out of the library. It’s got a back cover blurb by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the start of which I think captures this novel’s mood and themes perfectly: “What’s childhood? It’s when you don’t know things. What things? The things you learn in childhood.”
Disgruntled follows its protagonist, Kenya Curtis, from a public elementary school in West Philadelphia to a private school in the suburbs, and other places, too, as she grows up and learns various things about her family and society and race and class and trusting or not trusting other people. A lot of Kenya’s experiences are of not fitting in, whether in her mostly-black elementary school (because her parents are raising her in an Afrocentric way that’s foreign to the other kids) or in the mostly-white private school where she ends up, or in terms of being on the fringes of dances and parties, or in terms of not feeling at home when she’s at home, for various reasons. In elementary school, Kenya has one friend, but only so that she’ll have “a partner at lunch, someone [to] walk with on the zoo trip, talk to at recess, someone she could sit with on the sidelines of Double Dutch, trying to make watching look fun” (5). In sixth grade, she’s part of a clique, but “what drew them together was not laughing, fun, or shared passion, but seating charts, laziness, and the desire to move in a group” (82). Later at private school, Kenya has a best friend, but it’s a brief and tumultuous experience; she also becomes close with a boy she’d met in elementary school, but it’s not quite the kind of closeness she wants.
This book felt more plot-heavy than I maybe expected it to be, which isn’t a bad thing, but it’s hard to talk about without going into more detail than I want to. So: because I love lists, here is a great one, from when Kenya first starts at private school:
Each day at Barrett was a new sensory experience for Kenya: chilly stone hallways; clammy modeling clay; picking impossibly sticky long hairs off her schoolbag; a school uniform of scratchy bloomers with a navy-blue dress called a tunic or a gray skirt called a kilt; a rubbery-tasting mouthguard for field hockey; the sound of hand bells; what shall we do with a drunken sailor; the distinct sneaker-fart funk of the school bus; a gym teacher with a British accent; dreidl (dreidl, dreidl); cupcakes for Trinity Howell’s birthday; cupcakes for Katherine Stein’s birthday; cupcakes for Sengu Gupta’s birthday; body on fire with cold as Kenya finally, after two weeks of increasingly irritable cajoling from Mrs. Winston, forced herself into the pool in gym class. (65)
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