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They Come in All Colors A Novel Malcolm Hansen Books

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They Come in All Colors A Novel Malcolm Hansen Books

On one level, They Come in All Colors is a rich and complex coming of age tale. The story is told from the point of view of Huey Fairchild, the biracial son a a Georgia peanut farmer and the beautiful black woman he is not permitted to marry in the apartheid American South of the 1950’s. The racial tensions eventually tear the family apart, and Huey moves to New York City with his mother, where Huey continues to struggle with questions of racial identity.

But the novel is considerably more than the delivery vehicle for a social message. We learn that Huey’s narrative is assigned as punishment for an assault on a fellow student at Clarement, the elite New York prep school to which Huey, against all odds, has been admitted. Huey is told that he must write a fifty-page essay “exploring the root causes of shame as a source of anger and a lack of personal accountability and a depleted sense of self-worth.”

At first Huey protests: “Fifty pages? That’s a book!” But as Huey writes, the narrative becomes something more. Huey discovers that his art enables him to transcend the world in which he is perpetual victim, a world over which he has no control, in which he is helplessly buffeted “like a dead leaf kicked up in the autumn wind.” At 50 pages Huey finds that he is just getting warmed up. Huey, like Hansen, conjures an imaginative world which transcends the oppressive realities which surround him.

The novel accomplishes what Nabokov tells us is the purpose of great fiction: “ . . . to afford what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” A whites only swimming pool in Akersburg becomes a powerful symbol for Huey, a “keyhole” through which he glimpses a world in which brutality and thuggishness and pettiness give way to grace, to beauty, to possibilities.

“They Come in All Colors” is the most interesting and original debut novel that I have read in quite a few years. It is technically accomplished. Upon entering Hansen’s world, one looks around in wonder and appreciation--and after 350 pages, regrets reaching the exit.


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They Come in All Colors A Novel Malcolm Hansen Books Reviews

As soon as I read the blurb on this book I was eager to get my hands on a copy. It's a coming of age story about a bi-racial boy who witnesses and experiences prejudice in his hometown in Georgia in the 1960's (although not quite understanding what he was witnessing), and later, in the 1970's, as a teen in NYC as he attends an all-white prestigious high school.

Unfortunately, I struggled on and off for two weeks to get through this book. I didn't connect with the story or the main character and found the author's method of telling the story disjointed, hard to follow and the lack of quotation marks didn't help matters. While I think the author was trying for a look at civil rights and racism through the eyes of a child (kind of like John Boyne looked at the Holocaust through the eyes of young Bruno in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas), I don't think that was achieved here. I felt it lacked emotion, connection to its characters and fluidity in the storytelling.

While others may enjoy this book more, They Come In All Colors just wasn't for me.

Disclaimer This Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) was generously provided by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.
They Come in All Colors by Malcolm Hansen is a coming of age story based in the 1960’s during the Civil Rights movement. Our main character, Huey, takes us back and forth between his 8 year old self in the small town of Akersburg, GA, and his teenage self in NYC where he attends the prestigious Claremont prep school. Huey is biracial with a white father and a black mother and the entire story is told from his perspective, as a child and then as a teen. The plot also skips between several places and times in what appears to be randomly at first, but as the book moves forward it begins to make more sense.

Reading about the Civil Rights protests in a small town in the Deep South through an 8 year old’s eyes is disconcerting at the very least. I sometimes felt like I wanted to race through these parts just so I could find out how Huey finally finds out/realizes that he’s not actually white, and how he deals with it. Seeing racial tension rise to boiling point through a kid’s eyes felt very eye opening and the narrative is so well written that you feel like you are there with him, trapped in this mind of a kid who doesn’t really understand the absolute stupidity of adults, as well as the deeply rooted issues that are being fought against.

I love how well-rounded Huey is as a character. He’s a real teenager, he has to deal with all the issues regular teens deal with as well as living in a new city which is night and day from his home town, but also the issue of not fitting in, even in the more progressive north. He’s still the only biracial kid in his school where white supremacy is all powerful. Huey’s vision comes from what he has been taught, and what he believes to be the truth and he has a hard time reconciling everything he has seen in his life.

I don’t want to add too many spoilers, and if I start getting into the plot I will. Let me just say that this novel is a gem. It took me a few chapters to get into it though as Huey’s narrative is very much stream of consciousness. His thoughts are all over the place, so it takes a while to get used to it. I’m so glad I didn’t let myself just be lazy and put it aside though, because They Come in All Colors is brilliant. It’s an epic view on recent history, and on today as well, but also an excellent display of how a childhood is shaped by events within the family and also current events, and how we hiding the truth to avoid pain often causes more pain down the line...

I just want everyone to read this book!
On one level, They Come in All Colors is a rich and complex coming of age tale. The story is told from the point of view of Huey Fairchild, the biracial son a a Georgia peanut farmer and the beautiful black woman he is not permitted to marry in the apartheid American South of the 1950’s. The racial tensions eventually tear the family apart, and Huey moves to New York City with his mother, where Huey continues to struggle with questions of racial identity.

But the novel is considerably more than the delivery vehicle for a social message. We learn that Huey’s narrative is assigned as punishment for an assault on a fellow student at Clarement, the elite New York prep school to which Huey, against all odds, has been admitted. Huey is told that he must write a fifty-page essay “exploring the root causes of shame as a source of anger and a lack of personal accountability and a depleted sense of self-worth.”

At first Huey protests “Fifty pages? That’s a book!” But as Huey writes, the narrative becomes something more. Huey discovers that his art enables him to transcend the world in which he is perpetual victim, a world over which he has no control, in which he is helplessly buffeted “like a dead leaf kicked up in the autumn wind.” At 50 pages Huey finds that he is just getting warmed up. Huey, like Hansen, conjures an imaginative world which transcends the oppressive realities which surround him.

The novel accomplishes what Nabokov tells us is the purpose of great fiction “ . . . to afford what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” A whites only swimming pool in Akersburg becomes a powerful symbol for Huey, a “keyhole” through which he glimpses a world in which brutality and thuggishness and pettiness give way to grace, to beauty, to possibilities.

“They Come in All Colors” is the most interesting and original debut novel that I have read in quite a few years. It is technically accomplished. Upon entering Hansen’s world, one looks around in wonder and appreciation--and after 350 pages, regrets reaching the exit.