All over Again
SynopsisPlot
All Over Again is a hilarious and enchanting coming-of-age story as a young boy goes through the trials and joys and puberty, battles with his 6-year-old sister who is the bane of his existence, worries about disappointing his mother, and understands his father. He has to learn to get around the town's bully while moving beyond know-it-all Kenny. The story is energetically told and has an enchanting narrative style that pulls you into it immediately. Growing up is hard. You know this. And when your mother has X-ray eyes and dances like a wobbling bag of water? When your father's idea of fun is to put all your money in a savings account and make you get up at 5 am every Sunday morning?
Story
About this book
All Over Again follows a young boy navigating the confusion and small victories of growing up. Written by A-dZiko Simba Gegele, the novel is set in Jamaica and told in an energetic narrative voice that places the reader close to its protagonist's perspective. He contends with puberty, a six-year-old sister who tests his patience at every turn, and parents whose habits baffle him. His mother seems to see through walls, and his father believes that saving every coin and waking at five on Sunday mornings counts as quality time.
Beyond the household, the boy must find ways around the local bully and figure out how to deal with Kenny, a peer who always claims to know best. These everyday pressures, none of them catastrophic on their own, pile up into the particular anxiety of someone not yet sure he is ready for the next stage of life. Gegele draws humor from the gap between childhood logic and the adult world that keeps pressing in.
The book belongs to a tradition of Caribbean coming-of-age fiction that grounds its storytelling in local speech patterns and domestic detail. Its focus stays on ordinary family friction rather than grand events, building its portrait of adolescence from accumulated small moments.
