Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky

Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia is an adventure for 9 year olds about a boy carrying more grief than he knows what to do with.

What happens

Tristan has just lost his first boxing match in front of his father and his grandfather, who are both boxers. That's the small problem. The big one is Eddie, his best friend, who died in a bus accident a few weeks earlier. All Tristan has left of him is a journal, and Tristan is the only person who can see it glowing.

His parents send him down to the family farm in Alabama for a month to get some air. He is not remotely on board with this plan.

Tristan tells you all of it himself, and that's the best thing here. He talks straight at you, warns you to buckle up, argues with you about whether you really want to hear this. He's very funny about twelve hours in a car with his granddad and completely honest about everything else. When the pressure sits on his chest and he can't breathe, you feel it with him.

At the far edge of the farm there's a knot of old trees his nana calls the Bottle Tree forest, hung with glass to catch wandering spirits. She tells him to stay away from them. Something in there is already looking for him.

What happens next tears a hole into somewhere else, a place of burning sea and iron monsters, where the gods and heroes of Black American stories are worn out from fighting. John Henry. Brer Rabbit. Anansi the spider, who never gives anything away for nothing.

A word about what this book is carrying. A child's death is the engine of the whole story, it's talked about plainly rather than softened, and Tristan's guilt about not saving his friend is not tidied away quickly. There's real fighting too. For a reader who has lost someone, that could land hard, or it could be exactly the book they need, and you'll know which one you've got.

It's American through and through in the voice and the slang, which is a good part of the pleasure.

What to read next

If that mix of proper myth and a very modern boy appeals, try Race to the Sun. Nizhoni Begay can spot monsters wearing human faces, and the one sitting in the bleachers at her basketball game has taken an unwelcome interest in her family.