My rating: 3.5/5 stars

I found NW super slow to get into but it picks up in the middle and by the end you almost forget that you wanted to give up on it when you initially started. Almost. But since I didn’t forget, I’m gonna have to give this one 3.5 stars instead of 4. (Petty, I know)

There are three main fictional stories in this book that centre around the lives of mostly black individuals in NW (North West London). Like I said, the first story dragged a little, the middle story started to get interesting and it wasn’t until the third story that I started to realize that all these characters and lives are possibly connected. This isn’t a spoiler btw, just shows how unmemorable the first half of the book was..to me. I actually flipped back to the first 100 pages to make sure I was reading about the same people.

Once you get past the slow start, a really interesting story starts to emerge with characters that are different yet the same. They share similarities in the sense that they all live in this mostly black neighbourhood in London and want better lives for themselves yet have different interpretations of what success looks like/how to go about achieving it.

Most intriguing to me was the story of Natalie/Keisha Blake. Keisha starts going by ‘Natalie’ when she decides she wants to be serious about her education and future career. She doesn’t see anything good about the neighbourhood she grew up in and can’t understand why some people who live there don’t want better for themselves. She’s so convinced that her version of success is the only version, that she genuinely can’t comprehend other people’s contentment with their life.

It takes most people (regardless of race), a long time to become confident in the person that they are. In this case, Smith specifically showcases the different characters’ struggles with their blackness, their environment and how they are perceived by other people. You witness characters wanting to prove their worth to themselves, or to their family, or to the rest of the world.

I think the saddest part was seeing some of these characters so desperately trying to run away from their past and in pursuit of a better and different future that when that “better” future eventually arrives they don’t even recognize it.