This memoir tells the story of Trevor Noah's childhood spent in a wildly different society from what we're used to in the West. Being a mixed race boy meant in large part that he didn't fit into most of the categories in people's minds. When he was very young, it was a time where the law severely suppressed the mixing of races, accounting for the title of the book. His mother, of Xhosa background, plays a large role during the major part of the story, his Swiss German father only in one short but memorable chapter. By the time he was going to school the apartheid system was abolished and Nelson Mandela rose to power.

His personality shines through strongly, as a young and naive child, in school as he found his gift for cutting deals, then working on the township streets once out of school culminating in a brush with the law. As a natural comedian at heart and narrator of his own audiobook, he frequently plays up the comic aspects of his experiences, but not always, and especially not in the last chapter in an unexpectedly dark and harrowing coming of age account. South Africa sounds like a land of huge variations not only between cities, ethnic homelands, and townships but even from block to block. I felt like it would be hard to imagine what it would be like if I were thrown into that kind of setting, and given the enormous shifts that country went through, maybe life was really more of a matter of luck than other places. I found it absorbing and complex, not afraid to dig below the surface of how societies work and explain this to the world in a thoughtful fashion.