Review of the Day: Kwame Crashes the Underworld by Craig Kofi Farmer

Kwame Crashes the Underworld
By Craig Kofi Farmer
Roaring Brook Press (an imprint of Macmillan)
$17.99
ISBN: 9781250900265
Ages 9-12

No. I’m sorry, but no. You want to know what the Harry Potter series actually wrought? A resurgence in reading amongst kids, sure, that’s recorded for posterity. But it also brought about a massive, and I’m talking massive, new wave of interest in fantasy novels for readers between the ages of 9-12. And would you like to know what that meant for the publishing industry? It meant, as of this writing, for the last 27 years we have been ceaselessly inundated with crappy fantasy. Not all of it. Some of the fantasy books that have come out have been quite brilliant, honestly. But due to demand (which, while it has slaked off, never entirely disappeared) the bulk of the books to hit bookstore and libraries shelves has been overwhelmingly meh. Now a nice trend emerged in the last five years in which a lot of the fantasy has starred BIPOC protagonists. Some of those book have been scintillating and stellar. Books like The Rhythm of Time by Questlove with S.A. Cosby, The Marvellers by Dhonielle Clayton, ill. Khadijah Khatib, and Nic Blake and the Remarkables by Angie Thomas. But there have been others that have sucked. Sucked so much that they turn you off the entire notion of reading middle grade fantasy altogether. Maybe that’s why I’m so grateful to encounter a book like Kwame Crashes the Underworld by Craig Kofi Farmer. You want a plot that’s tight? World-building that manages to be both comprehensible and succinct? And heart too, right? You want to actually feel something as a result of the hero’s journey? Welp, here you go. I don’t know how it’s possible that this is Craig Kofi Farmer’s first novel for kids considering its complete mastery of the form, but you know what? I’m not complaining.

He’s not going. Sure, Kwame is supposed to be packing up so that his family can go to Ghana to celebrate the life of his grandmother. But ever since she died, Kwame’s felt hollow. The thought of joining the relatives he hardly knows in a country he knows so little about is not something he wants to do. If only something could get him out of it. Well, that something comes, but not in the form he expected. While at a sleepover with his best friend Autumn, the two encounter a cheeky monkey-like creature. Next thing Kwame knows, the aboatia has stolen his dashiki, the last thing his grandmother made for him. Chasing it down leads Kwame and Autumn into another world and there they find themselves locked into a quest to save humanity itself from capricious, vengeful gods. Will they survive and make it back home, or will human existence as we know it be over?

So way way back in 2013 I wrote a blog post called “2013 Middle Grade Black Boys: Seriously People?”. In it, I counted all the middle grade novels starring Black boys that came out that year. I found a grand total of five, and three of those were written by sports stars. Less than a year after the piece came out, Walter Dean Myers wrote his seminal New York Times opinion article, “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” That piece, to a large extent, kicked off a revolution in the children’s publishing industry, including the formation of We Need Diverse Books. Even so, a goodly chunk of the books coming out that starred Black boys were dour, serious, and chock full of trauma. So, a year after Walter’s piece came out, Kleaver Cruz founded the Black Joy Project. And slowly, in the intervening nine years, we’ve watched Black boys start to appear in books that can be described as something other than trauma lit. Now finding a Black boy in a middle grade novel that’s hilarious and realistic is still like trying to find a unicorn, but at least in the fantasy realm we’ve seen incredible improvements. Because if there’s one thing you can say about Kwame Crashes the Underworld, it’s that the book? It’s a blast!

Humor is hard. You can easily write something that comes off as hilarious to one person, mildly funny to another, and not funny at all to a third. In a book like Kwame some of that humor is your standard Spider-man fare. You know, the quippy hero who dodges baddies while keeping up light banter all the while. And there certainly is a hint of Miles Morales to Kwame, sure, but this kid is his own person. I was particularly impressed by the first sentence of the book (which is not something I get to say as often as I’d like): “If someone had told me a week ago that I was a weird reincarnation of the late Mother Earth, I probably would’ve searched for the nearest exit.” Good, right? Meanwhile, I found my co-workers were amused by other, entirely different passages. One was very much taken with a moment when Kwame and a villain face off and then the two start commiserating over their annoying relatives. You may not laugh at every one of Kwame’s comments in this book, but you’re going to have a good time with him anyway.

In 2024 I have seen two different middle grade fiction books starring Black boys with ties to Ghana come out, and they simply could not be more different. The first that I read was Flying Through Water by Mamle Wolo. That book is an incredible survival tale that starts out feeling like 12 Years a Slave but quickly takes a right turn and ends up feeling far more like Hatchet or My Side of the Mountain. The fact that Kwame also has Ghanaian ties just delights me to no end. And Farmer is never dull. He knows perfectly well that if you make a book sound like it’s teaching the kids stuff, they are going to avoid it like the plague. As such, when he works in Ghanaian elements, they’re worked seamlessly into the fabric of the storytelling. Kwame is chasing down his grandmother’s dashiki, he’s in an underworld completely infused with Ghanaian myths, Ghanaian gods pepper his existence, it’s all there!

Let’s talk villains. They’re both the most fun to write, and the most difficult. Currently, we live in an era where villains are most effective when they make a pretty good point. I’ve heard folks refer to this as the Killmonger Effect. Essentially, your baddie has a pretty understandable grasp of a problem, but then they’ve gone and taken it too far. That’s certainly the case with Anansi and Tano. And it’s kind of sad seeing Anansi as a baddie in this storyline since he’s such a fun trickster character usually, but you forgive the artistic liberty.

Now my librarians and I almost all agreed that this book was deserving of inclusion on our best books of the year list. Much of this has to do with the reasons I’ve already listed, but there was also the character of Autumn. Autumn is hearing impaired and has both hearing aids and uses ASL with Kwame regularly. This isn’t a quirk of the book, put in there to feel more inclusive. Autumn is a fully fleshed out individual, and as far as I could tell Farmer always plays fair with her sign language. Better still, she has her own character arc that she has to follow, and it’s separate from Kwame’s. Autumn may be the sidekick in the technical sense of the term, but she’s never othered or made to seem like an add on. Autumn’s her own person and you get that from the minute she steps onto the page. Pretty cool.

The book is also one of the best kinds of fantasy novels. It wraps up the overarching storyline, but it also leaves itself wide open for a sequel. Not simply with the fantasy parts either. There is definitely something going on with Kwame’s father in this book. The guy has just generally checked out of the whole parenting thing, and I’m wondering why. Hopefully, when we see the next Kwame book (and you better believe that we BETTER be seeing another Kwame book) we’ll get some deeper insights into that guy’s character. Until that book comes out, however, plenty of kids are going to get a kick out of Kwame. It has the thrills, the laughs, a marvelous sense of when to crank up the action and when to cool it down, even managing to wring some legitimate pathos out of Kwame’s feelings for his deceased grandmother. We’ve seen a lot of fantasy novels for kids come out over the years. Would that more of them were like Kwame Crashes the Underworld. This one’s a definite keeper.

On shelves now.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2024, Review 2024, Reviews