A moving and thought provoking story, that explores disabilities and mental health issues. It is a fantastic story about friendship, resilience, and personal growth.
Many thanks to River Grove Books and to Netgalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion

#BuryingThePawn #NetGalley
BURYING THE PAWN: a striking, soulful story of those who learn differently.
As a disabled person, I am always on the lookout for books about my community, and I have an especially soft spot for those books which have the gumption to be more than sappy little feelgood inspirational stories about „overcoming one's condition" and other such candy-ass malarkey that people used to find so endearing about this kind of story a while ago. And Mr. Kaufman knocks it way out of the park in this regard. Because all of his characters, Venezuelan Leo, Jewish-American Zeb, and African-American Kiara, are adults with learning disabilities, dealing with a lot of challenges in their lives, and not always ending up looking sparkly. In fact, they mess up quite gloriously at times, and I think this is the message that people should take away from this book: people, disabled or not, are inherently imperfect, and challenges are a part of everyone's lives. I loved spending time with these characters, I have a thing for flawed characters, and I have a thing for learning about historical events, which this book deals quite extensively with(Zeb's Jewish origin is explored extensively, and I have always been fascinated with the Jews). To those who have always felt like they were the odd ones out, this novel comes as a treat. Ten out of five, for a book with a hefty subject matter written in a heartfelt manner!

The characters are pretty interesting. In particular, Leo is a complex character that I didn't like for much of the book (that's not a bad thing, I think it's important to have characters that you don't like that aren't villains / antagonists).
I wasn't really sure where the book was going, rather than having a big climax or larger plot, it seemed to be more just about each character's individual journey and life.

There's a lot of people explaining things to each other in this book, offering long-winded asides about history, politics economics and stuff. It was sometimes interesting, sometimes not. But it was often not related to the central plot. I think some readers might really enjoy this, I was ambivalent on this. It didn't feel that well woven into the story, if it had been, I think I would have liked this element more. It felt that the plot and character development were held back by spending so much on tangents like this.

Some strange elements to the book, multiple characters (established as kind, trusted and respected) identify themselves to be Republicans, capitalists or conservative. It feels a bit odd and randomly inserted, by the end it felt a bit like propaganda in all honesty, to a lefty like me anyway.

I thought this book would have more in it about learning disabilities and neurodiversity, it is more of a background item. It contributes to some of the paths the three main characters follow, but it's not really explored in as much depth as I hoped.

All in all, I did enjoy this book but it felt a bit unfocused at times. If you like a gentle plot and learning about history and such at the same time, this book may be for you.