She’d tell me not to worry. She always came back to the phrase she lived by: “If God is with me, who can be against me?” She was never scared. Even when she should have been.

Trevor Noah for me always was just known as a funny guy, someone who had a night show, and told jokes on big stages. In his memoir Born a Crime, he covers the story of his life, and his perspective living through colonialism, apartheid, religion, and being an outsider in South Africa. Essentially, it’s a coming of age book that follows his journey out of an environment that was built against him.

This book reads like a bunch of shorter essays in which Noah fills us in on a little part of his life, which string together into one beautiful discussion about sociopolitical ideas. He blends his experience with articulate storytelling, and uses humor to soften the blow of some heavy experiences he had. For instance, his existence itself is illegal - for his mother is black and his father is white - so whenever he was outside and the police were around, he was treated like a bag of weed in which everyone claimed that Noah wasn’t theirs.

The book is chronological, so each chapter and short essay feels like a new theme that Noah takes on, making it very easy to digest. I found myself telling myself, “just one more chapter”, and finding myself one hundred pages later still reading. One regret that I have is not listening to the audiobook as the first listen - as Noah narrates in a spectacular way.

Born a Crime does what most books cannot do - weave between the line of a comedy and a tragedy. The honesty contained in this book and the raw storytelling allow me to reflect how pain can often shape our lives and mold us to be the way that we are.

Overall Rating: 8/10