Free Burning.

Free Burning by Bayo Ojikutu Three Rivers Press, October 2006 $13.95, ISBN 1-400-08289-7

Free Burning, the follow-up to Ojikutu's debut novel, 47th Street Black, takes readers into the grim realities of lives so bound up in cycles of poverty and degradation that often the only escape might well be to burn one's way free.

Tommie Simms--college-educated, husband and father--is laid off from his job at a prestigious insurance company in downtown Chicago following the 9/11 attacks. As his job prospects get increasingly bleak and bills mount up, he gravitates toward the lifestyle of his hustling cousins and other nefarious characters.

Ojikutu's images are deeply disturbing in their realism. The Four Corners neighborhood is the cell that traps Tommie, his family and the community in an economic grind that sucks at the human spirit. Like rats stuck in a box, Ojikutu's characters scuttle this way and that trying to beat the odds stacked against them. The birds swooping over the putrid lake are like vultures waiting to feast on the dead-in-life.

In some way, everyone is the enemy--family, friends, acquaintances, cops, employers, coworkers, the self. In Ojikutu's deft hands, though, even the most despicable character can be understood to some degree. The author's use of dialogue gives the story immediacy, and the poetic language with which he delivers the deepest revelations acts as a counterbalance to the harshness he describes.

Free Burning is a powerful work of urban fiction, a searing portrayal of one of the shameful realities within an unjust society.

--Reviewed by Denolyn Carroll

Denolyn Carroll is the deputy managing editor at Essence magazine