Reviews of New Boy

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 ..." Read more

"The plot works terrifyingly well in a playground... [The children] absorb adult habit – here the ingrained racism of Nixon-era suburban Amerian – 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." Read more

[Book Picks for Every Weekend of Summer] "Tracy Chevalier's highly readable and immaculately researched historical fiction this time takes place in 1970s Washington D.C., at an integrated school. Chevalier grew up in that environment; this book, though fictional, is a powerful exploration of betrayal and bullying – and casual racisim."

"Filtered through the lens of adolescents the story works perfectly ... Every action in this fishbowl takes on an extra level of intensity and whole social systems rise and fall over the course of a lunch hour." ... "Chevalier gives us a story that is timely and engaging, a novel that is well worth reading in its own right, no matter its lineage." Read more

"The school's calculatedly malevolent Ian is a mixture of public civility and private rage, the achievement being that, as in Shakespeare's play, his real motivation might be sexual jealousy, racial prejudice, Schadenfreude or a malign combination of all three. The strawberry-spotted handkerchief is ingeniously reworked as a strawberry-encrusted pencil case, although the novel is more than just an intertextual jigsaw: a free-standing and compelling tragic thriller in its own right." Read more

"Like Othello, Osei moves in a white world that doesn't really want him ... Unlike Othello, he has never sought to triumph, to justify himself with magnificence, which he grasps will simply cause resentment." ... "Sisa, Osei's older sister, represents a better way: she knows that Black is Beautiful and her African heritage a thing to glory in. It's thoughtfully done, and shows all the craft one would expect from the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring." Read more

"Chevalier's novel does an admirable job of prompting readers to look backwards to Shakespeare's original material, and forward to the lessons that 1970s-era school children might still teach us about the state of race relations in the US today." Read more

"The depth of connection between the original and this new work is astonishing ... It is clean and clever and emotionally charged, filled with moments that reflect perfectly the source material while never straying from the truths of the new setting." Read more

"A powerful, disquieting retelling of Othello that falls squarely in the hits column." ... "Chevalier frames the story within the charged political context around African American power and identity ... I like that [she] drew upon her own experience of being an outsider as a white girl at a school with mostly black students." Read more

"Having taught grade school aged children, I understand that some serious drama can unfold on the playground and Chevalier uses this to weave a story surrounding jealousy, bullying, young love and betrayal. I felt like this was a brilliant retelling [of Othello] and would love to see this incorporated into classrooms ... it would be amazing to have youth actually connecting to themes in Shakespeare without being bogged down by the language." Read more