Fiction Review

John Lazoo
by John Reyer Afamasaga
ISBN 978-0-9803486-0-6
Review by Heather Froeschl

When we re-create ourselves, are we more like actors in a play than we imagine? Or are we who we really are supposed to be? It is difficult to say which of our selves is the real us. In "John Lazoo," by John Reyer Afamasaga, readers will see the process of evolution within one man.

James Elton, born into the world with hardly a chance to survive, becomes a man by the age of seven when he works for his daily bread. His young mother does whatever she can to get by, living in a cottage on a farm owned by the man who will change her son's life. She reads James her own poetry as they sleep in the same bed, and she smells of her own homemade soap. At age nine, James enters a whole other world of incarceration, one which he will never truly escape. His soul becomes jailed and he learns to do what he must to survive.

Leaving the physical jails, James makes his way to NYC where he was born in a shelter before his mother ran for the fresh start of clean air. The city holds many dangers and opportunities for a young man who has no skills, no identification and cannot read. He begins to reinvent himself. What he becomes, his mother surely would not like. The devil is in the details of this tale and the deeds done are a form of hell on earth. James, now John, falls in love and hopes that it will save him. In the end, he may need to save her too.

This work is masterfully poetic. It reads much like a work of art, and leaves the reader to decipher the resulting impressions. Confusing at times, chaotic, yet carefully scripted, it is a highly interesting read.