New Boy by Tracy Chevalier.
Arriving at his fourth school in six years, diplomat’s son Osei Kokote knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day – so he’s lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl. By the end of the day, the school and its key players – teachers and pupils alike – will never be the same again.
This was a very good read with good characters. Lots of fighting and bullying in this school. And the new Boy was ridiculed for being black. 5* . Thanks netgalley.

The Hogarth Shakespeare series has brought us a mixed bunch of novelisations to date, some excellent (My Name is Shylock, Hag-Seed), some so-so (Vinegar Girl), and this which just didn't work for me at all. Chevalier transfers Othello to an American elementary school in 1970s Washington and makes all the characters 11-year-olds - yep, 11.

In some ways this sticks quite closely to the play in terms of the plot and characters details: (O is Othello, Dee is Desdemona, the racist teacher Mr Brabant is Brabantio, the school bully Ian is Iago, the handkerchief is a strawberry pencil case) but it misses the spirit of the play by a long way - and cramming all the events into a single day compounds the unbelievability of the whole thing.

Making the characters children (and given that this is the 1970s, they're likely to be more immature than today's 11-year-olds) means that their thoughts and actions don't have psychological verisimilitude: I couldn't believe for a second that Mimi (Emilia) can say to O (Othello) 'I used it to get him to break up with me. Otherwise I would always be under his power and I couldn't stand that'; or that O himself, at 11, can think this about his sister: 'She was fifteen years old; wasn't that too young to become a radical?'.

Making O the eponymous 'new boy' upsets the way that Othello is 'the Moor of Venice', already both an insider and outsider when the play opens, and the fact that he has a family, complete with a Black Power-saluting sister, erases his status as a loner with a wavering sense of self-identity. This novel consistently over-simplifies issues which are nicely complicated in the play.

The ending is particularly jarring: without giving away spoilers, Mimi is some kind of a clairvoyant so has intimations the events have happened before, and O's final action just has no justification and makes no psychological sense.

Sorry to be so damning but this really didn't work for me at all: even if it weren't an imaginative re-engagement with Othello, it wouldn't stand up as a story of 1970s 11-year-olds on a single day at school.