Quote: Fifteen-year-old footballer and bad-boy Leo and his younger, hearing-impaired sister, Lila, both white, witnessed and barely survived the murder of their mother and burning of their home by their stepfather. As their new foster family in a town nearby, all of the Poultons, including their two adopted children, try their best to make the transition as easy as possible for Leo and Lila. Lila immediately gloms onto her new family. Leo, however, is expectedly rebellious, snide and flirting with danger. The giant burn scar on his arm constantly makes him ill, and it’s clear to readers that he most likely is experiencing PTSD. Meanwhile, Charlie, also 15 and adopted from an orphanage in Brazil when he was 2, immediately takes a liking to Leo. Soon the two crush on each other and illicitly make out in Charlie’s bedroom. A predictable act of violence ensues, which threatens Leo and Lila’s ability to stay together. Leigh’s prose is fairly straightforward, wrought with psychological and emotional drama that teeters on the brink of becoming too much. The lovable secondary characters, including Charlie’s older brother Andy and sassy, goth-chic sister Fliss, bring humanity and hilarity to the narrative. Though readers of edgier teen fiction may find the novel fairly tame, others will be charmed by the warmth of the Poulton family and the bad-boy sensibility of Leo.

   

Quote: Karl spends the most formative years of his childhood (11-14) at the exclusive Drakensberg Choir School in a remote part of South Africa (see the choir in action above). This is perhaps where fiction is informed by real life as Marc Behr went to the same school aged 10-12 (see the pictures above, he is second from left in the first photograph). In the novel, Karl has a relationship with both a school friend and with his Choir Master. Embrace must make uncomfortable reading at the School, as it is not that large with just 120 pupils and could be read by some as a ‘truthful’ account of Behr’s time at the school, even though no such claims have ever been made.  Like other authors in this genre, the use of a familiar location provides for the authenticity of the novels produced. Certainly, Marlowe’s ‘Alexander’s Choice’ is richer for its detailed description of the day to day running of Eton as an institution.

On reading Embrace for the fourth time, I now appreciate more the central 11-14 year old Karl’s eye view of the World, complete with the adolescent predilection for endless lists and rants that could run through the mind of a boy his age. Large chunks of the book read like a diary or set of letters. Towards the end, the inevitable diary does indeed take centre stage.

Embrace is quite a read as the action moves back and forth in time between early childhood and the present. There is also a central conceit in that Karl threatens to write a book in English but leave chunks in Afrikaans (angry as a boy at how some of the books he reads do the same thing). Embrace is exactly that, written in English with some bits in untranslated Afrikaans (Behr’s first book ’The Smell of Apples’ was written in Afrikaans and then translated into English).

Both Behr’s first two books touch on a boy’s eye view of betrayal and people not being what they seem. This was true of Behr in real life who whilst at Stellenbosch University, spied on his fellow students for the soon to fall apartheid regime. He confessed all it but remained a controversial figure in some circles. Despite this backstory colouring some of the reviews of Embrace, Mark Behr ended up a professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee.

After writing The Smell of Apples and Embrace, Behr went on to write one further book ‘Kings of the Water’.

The reason I am writing this now is whilst rereading Embrace I wanted to remind myself of Mark Behr and to see whether he had written anymore, the answer is no as sadly Behr died in December 2015 at the comparatively young age of 52.

If you have not read either ‘The Smell of Apples’ or ‘Embrace’ I would encourage you to do so as both are excellent books about the complexities of boyhood relationships. They have much in common with other books in this genre.