Sixteen year old Lanre Bandele finds solace in his music and dreams of being professional musician. Can dreams come true? Maybe.
An unexpected opportunity arrives and his journey takes him on an unforgettable experience.
Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic and filled with rhythm and colorful characters, this contemporary Nigerian story is about a teenager, his love for music and above all growing up.
My Review of I Was a Teen Rock Star! by A.H. Mohammed.
If you have read The Last Days at Forcados High School, then you would know that A.H. Mohammed is adept in creating masterpieces. I really enjoyed reading this one.
This is a coming of age story about a teenager, Lanre Bandele, whose dream is to be a rock star and play the guitar for the rest of his life.
At the young age of six, his mother would abandon him in her distant cousin, Alimat’s house, and then go away.
His father, a renowned polygamist, would call him a bad luck child and abandon him too. So he would grow up with the fear of the people he loves abandoning him.
Everyone he loves eventually leaves him, and he has resigned himself to the terrible fact that his life would never amount to anything because he is a bad luck child.
I would never understand the reason behind abandoning your own child. Why bother bringing them into this world, if you can’t at least be present in their lives?
Because everyone sees Lanre as a bad luck child, he starts seeing himself as a failure too, and sadly, he fails at everything he does.
In school, he is the oddball who always comes last in class, and everyone mocks and jeers him.
He would forever be in the maze of uncertainties and keep asking himself these terrible questions, why am I me? Why am I not good enough? Why am I the weird one?
The only thing he is grateful for is his guitar, and his uncle that taught him how to play. He believes somehow he can be a rock star, and that is what keeps him glued together when his life starts falling apart.
He would meet Malik, a talent manager, who would get him signed to a record label and turn his life around.
But will his streaks of bad luck resurface and mess everything up, or will he become a popular rock star like he always wishes for? You have to get a copy of this book to find out.
One thing I like about Mohammed’s writing style is its simplicity, and yet humor. The characters in this book are well developed, and it is targeted for the young adults.
There are a lot of moral lessons derivable from this book; one is to never look down on anyone.
Everybody is unique in their own way, and just because someone is a bit different from you doesn’t make them weird and makes you normal.
Normality is subjective, what might be very normal to you might be strange to another person and vice versa.
Another important one is that if you know you are unable to fulfil your parental duties, please do not have kids.
Children never ask you to have them. They didn’t do anything wrong to deserve the trauma and neglect their absent parents make them suffer.
When you abandon a child, you scar them for life. Some might end up healing, if they enter the right hands.
But the unfortunate ones end up being traumatized for the rest of their lives.
I would rate this book as 4.5/5. It’s an important read.
Have you read the book? What do you think about it? Please share your thoughts with me in the comment section.
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