Punching the Air

Nov 22

Punching the Air by @ibizoboi & @dr.yusefsalaam
Reviewed by Linda
📒📘📕📙

This book is incredible! A massive thank you to @harpercollinsch for putting this out into the world and into our hands!

Yesterday evening, @tandemcollectiveuk put on a great event hosted by @guvnab & @ibizoboi to discuss topics and themes around this book and it helped to put my thoughts into perspective.

Told in verse, Punching the Air is the retelling of the inner sub-conscience of a wrongly accused and imprisoned Black teenager Amal Shahid: a victim of racial profiling who is agonisingly awaiting his court date.

As Amal’s emotions reach breaking point and his soul is diminished, his creativity soars. Anyone reading this will feel the meaningfulness behind each word - each page is packed with illustration, each poem is clever and sharp. With focus on elements of the US constitution such as the 13th amendment, this book is as much about Amal’s journey as it is for every wrongly accused Black victim in the states. Most of all, this book is heavily inspired on Yusef Salaam’s life: one of the now exonerated Central Park Five, anyone who’s familiar with the case will see the connection between Yusef and Amal.

A timely and devastating read but hopeful nonetheless. Unmissable.

LindaFictionpunching the airyusef salaamibi zoboicentral park fiveexonerated fivewhen they see us13th amendmentharper collins

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

Punching the Air

Asking for a Friend

How We Met