One day Ghanaian diplomat’s son Osei Kokote walks onto an all-white playground — his fourth school in as many years. He knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day — so he’s lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl.
The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a 1970s suburban Washington schoolyard, where kids fall in and out of love before lunchtime and practice a casual racism picked up from the adults around them. By the end of the day, the school and its key players — teachers and pupils alike — will never be the same again.
Inspiration
For their celebration of 400 years of Shakespeare’s death, Hogarth Press asked me to take part in their Shakespeare Project, in which writers are invited to write a novel inspired by one of his plays. I chose Othello, for its timeless themes of jealousy and discrimination. I like writing about outsiders. For once, I did not have to make up a story or characters; I simply had to choose the setting and adapt the story to it. Where can you find passion, jealousy, discrimination, and betrayal, all in one intense place? Look no further than a school playground.
Reviews
With breathtaking urgency, Chevalier brings Othello to a 1970s suburban elementary school outside Washington, D.C., where the playground is as rife with poisonous intrigue as any monarch’s court. Chevalier’s brilliantly concentrated and galvanizing improvisation thoroughly exposes the malignancy and tragedy of racism, sexism, jealousy, and fear. —Booklist
The plot works terrifyingly well in a playground. The children absorb adult habits — here the engrained racism of Nixon-era suburban America — and reproduce it with innocence. Prior knowledge of Othello's ending makes the final act, played out over monkey bars on a jungle gym, all the worse: such adult consequences to the actions of those young makes the outcome breathtakingly sad. —Times Literary Supplement
How Chevalier renders Iago's scheme into the terms of a modern-day playground provides some wicked delight. She's immensely inventive about it all. Even the play's fierce sexual energy finds an appropriate correspondence among these adolescents storming through puberty. —Washington Post
The novel is more than just an intertextual jigsaw: a free-standing and compelling tragic thriller in its own right. —Times Higher Education
Chevalier possesses a great talent for invoking a sense of time and place in her novels, and this one is no exception. From the flowered legs of bell-bottom jeans to the smack of double-dutch ropes on the playground, New Boy captures the spirit of the era. A masterful and powerful retelling. —San Francisco Book Review
Jump rope rhymes, jungle gyms, kickball games, and a typical cafeteria meal of Salisbury steak and tater tots: it's impressive how Ms. Chevalier takes these ordinary elements and transforms them into symbols of a complex hierarchy and shifting loyalties. Most remarkable, though, is how the novel explores the psyche of a boy isolated by racial difference. —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
One would hope that New Boy will one day be plopped down onto the desks of students as they whine and gripe over having to read their annual Shakespeare play in English class. This is the perfect answer to the constant student question — why do we have to read this old thing? — and it is proof of the usual teacher response — because it is still relevant. —National Post
