Be Boy Buzz

A book for reading aloud, this is an exuberant celebration of boyness, of being black, and of the sounds of words. Deeply sophisticated in its ambition, it can perhaps be seen as a descendant of the American classic Ounce Dice Trice by Alastair Reid and Ben Shahn. Hooks’ simple but powerful text entwines itself with Raschka’s bold shapes, dancing across the double-page spreads. ‘I be boy. All bliss boy. All fine beat. All beau boy’. In a book of this kind, words and pictures are inseparable, experienced simultaneously, rather like a vocal duet, and Raschka and Hooks achieve a nice harmony here as the music rises and falls and we explore the many sides of being a boy; ‘… laughing, crying, telling my story / talking way too loud / Then sitting all quiet / still.’

Perhaps a minor shortcoming of the book is that it is rather relentlessly brown, the uniform background colour of the pages forcing the shapes to work that much harder to create pace and rhythm. It’s good to know it’s now OK to be a boy, though.