Name: Finnegan Cole's review of Hum If You Don't Know the Words by Bianca Marais
Item: Hum If You Don't Know the Words
Rating: 3
Author: Finnegan Cole

Bianca Marais

Perfect for readers of The Secret Life of Bees and The Help, a perceptive and searing look at Apartheid-era South Africa, told through one unique family brought together by tragedy. Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a ten-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred...until the Soweto Uprising, in which a protest by black students ignites racial conflict, alters the fault lines on which their society is built, and shatters their worlds when Robin’s parents are left dead and Beauty’s daughter goes missing. After Robin is sent to live with her loving but irresponsible aunt, Beauty is hired to care for Robin while continuing the search for her daughter. In Beauty, Robin finds the security and family that she craves, and the two forge an inextricable bond through their deep personal losses. But Robin knows that if Beauty finds her daughter, Robin could lose her new caretaker forever, so she makes a desperate decision with devastating consequences. Her quest to make amends and find redemption is a journey of self-discovery in which she learns the harsh truths of the society that once promised her protection. Told through Beauty and Robin's alternating perspectives, the interwoven narratives create a rich and complex tapestry of the emotions and tensions at the heart of Apartheid-era South Africa. Hum If You Don’t Know the Words is a beautifully rendered look at loss, racism, and the creation of family.

Hum If You Don't Know the Words

Kathleen Mullins

Finnegan Cole

Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin, a ten-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation, but worlds apart, Beauty, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children after her husband's death. Told through Beauty and Robin's alternating perspectives, the narratives interweave to create a rich and complex tapestry of the emotions and tensions at the heart of Apartheid South Africa. Hum If You Don't Know the Words is a beautifully rendered look at loss, racism, and the creation of family.

Colleen

4.5 Stars
 
Hum if You Don’t Know the Words is a vivid, emotional debut novel set in Apartheid-era South Africa.
 
I vividly remember the first time my dad played the album Graceland to me. Then he explained what Apartheid was and why the album was so controversial. But it would be years before I understood just how far-reaching Apartheid was. But that cannot come close to the horrors that people suffered during that time.

The central event of the story is the Soweto uprising. If you aren’t familiar with the events surrounding that, the rising racial tensions in South Africa turned what started as nonviolent march of black school children into a bloody slaughter as police released attack dogs and gunned down the crowd. The official death toll is usually listed as 176 with many of those being underage children. But many believe the real numbers are much higher. Because of the way police brutally hunted for any wounded protestors even in hospitals, doctors falsified reports and labeled bullet wounds as “abscesses,” and many injured were too afraid to even seek medical help. So the true death toll will never be known. But the tragedy was very real. Even though Hum if You Don’t Know the Words is a fictional story, the events at the core of this story were unfortunately real. Marais did an excellent job of researching and placing her characters in and round true events in a plausible and emotional way. The descriptions of the Soweto uprising literally made me cry, and believe me, I don’t cry easily. But Marais captured the raw emotions of the scene excellently. It isn’t one I will forget any time soon. I will include a Trigger Warning: racism, police brutality, hate crimes, murder, anti-Semitism, and homophobia.


  “I didn’t know what to say in a world where people were hated and attacked for not being the right color, not speaking the right language, not worshipping the right god or not loving the right people; a world where hatred was the common language, and bricks, the only words.”

The story is told from two perspectives. The first is a ten-year-old English girl named Robin. The second is a forty-year-old Xhosa woman named Beauty. The two perspectives contrasted the very different lives of people in South Africa in the 1970’s. Adult novels told from children’s perspectives are risky. In this case, it seems like a good choice. The two POVs allow exploration of different aspects of the time period. Robin’s perspective shows the ways in which her society was already pressing the roots of racism into her even at that young age. She doesn’t have hate in her heart, but like any kid, she repeats things she hears. She is still malleable, and the world is rapidly trying to force her to conform to its own bias.
 
There are many books about racism that get accused of promoting the White Knight – where the black characters can only change their circumstances if a white character intervenes. But in Hum if You Don’t Know the Words, Beauty is intelligent, strong, and heartfelt. Her words were beautiful and haunting. When I read her sections, I didn’t feel like I was reading an author’s words; it truly felt like a mother desperately searching for her daughter. Her words were so vivid and visceral. Beauty has watched her world greatly change in her lifetime. She was a schoolteacher, college educated, multilingual, and kindhearted. Yet the imploding situation in South Africa left her unable to work in her field, separated from family, and frequently degraded and in danger. I was completely immersed in her story.


  “Only after I had learned those boundaries and generalities of my grief was I able to venture further into the mountains and valleys, the peaks and troughs of my despair. And as I traversed them-breathing a sigh of relief thinking that I'd conquered the worst of it-only then would I finally arrive at the truth about loss, the part no one ever warns you about: that grief is a city all of its own, built high on a hill and surrounded by stone walls. It is a fortress that you will inhabit for the rest of your life, walking its dead-end roads forever. The trick is to stop trying to escape and, instead, to make yourself at home.”

As I mentioned, the story background seemed very well researched for historical and cultural accuracy. I cannot say for sure whether or not the bits of Africaanan, Swahili, and Xhosa words and cultural information are accurate but the historical detail was correct to my knowledge. Marais brought the time period to life excellently. The writing was lyrical while still being raw and poignant.
 
This was very strong for a debut. However the narrative was unbalanced. Beauty’s narrative was much stronger than Robin’s. The second half of the book lagged and wasn’t nearly as impactful as the first half. It was never bad, it just seemed a bit wan after such an evocative start to the book. The plot got a little stagnant. On top of that, Robin’s POV became predominate in the later part of the story. Robin was frustrating at times particularly when she was the main narrator. Even though I understood why it was structured that way, I wish the ending had been stronger.
 
The story had a good message, but the ending needed to be stronger particularly compared to the beginning of the story. Although I had a few minor critiques, Hum if You Don’t Know the Words was a moving story especially for a debut novel. I greatly look forward to reading more of Marais’s work in the future. I would recommend this to anyone who loves character-driven Historical Fiction.


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 5 Stars
Writing Style: 4 Stars
Characters and Character Development: 5 Stars
Plot Structure and Development: 4 Stars
Level of Captivation: 5 Stars
Originality: 5 Stars

RECOMMENDATIONS:
If you like this, try Homegoing

Hum If You Don’t Know the Words

Daryl Houston

I did enjoy the book, but it wasn't a great book. Some of the scenarios and dialogue were pretty forced, and it felt at times as if scenes or conversations labeled, e.g., "cute conversation between children who misunderstand the things they're talking about" were inserted but weren't really all that well done. The book had just a few too many stumbles of this sort to feel like a really polished book.

I also felt really conflicted about the perspective and the authorship here. I'm all for an author working to inhabit the perspectives of different people, but I felt a little icky about the white privileged author slipping into some of the characters she slips into, even if it's done with (as far as I can tell) generosity and kindness and positive intent. I don't think I'm suggesting that she shouldn't have done it or that she didn't do it reasonably well, but just that it made me a little uncomfortable and influenced my reception of the book.

And finally, I would like to've learned more of the history of apartheid and the Soweto uprising. I suppose that's just a disconnect between the author's intent and (part of) my aim here and the author's not really to blame for my mistaken expectations.

I certainly don't regret reading the book. It was a perfectly nice book and I did enjoy parts of it and learn some things I hadn't known from it (or, from Googling them), but it wasn't a book I'll remember especially fondly or that really appealed to me a lot.

Kathleen Mullins &
Hum If You Don't Know the Words by Bianca Marais

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Kathleen Mullins &Hum If You Don't Know the Words by Bianca Marais

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Kathleen Mullins &
Hum If You Don't Know the Words by Bianca Marais