The Rules

by Dianne Case

Teenage Adam obeys the rules and dreams big, of real soccer boots and of playing for South Africa one day. Jasmine, his twin sister, is street-smart and lives by her own rules. She dreams too, of a life outside of poverty. Meanwhile she saves all her coins in a glass jar on the top of Auntie Fouzie's cupboard. But things are changing. The country is facing a general election, Daddy didn't come home again last night, and Uncle Grootman is sitting in a wheelchair. Then Germany beats Brazil seven goals to one...

194 pages, Paperback

Published July 25, 2016

Reviews

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a matter of time before someone wrote lyrically about the Cape Flats. With characters coming alive through the pages of this book, this is more like a documentary on the troubled Cape Town hotspot than a book of fiction.
Foster care, gang warfare, schools in disrepair, dog fights - to the death and the quagmire little girls like Jasmine find themselves in with addicts for mothers … all come full on at the reader from out of these 190 pages.
Dianne Case has done exceptionally well.
The hallmarks seep through these pages, from the unwanted pregnancies by little girls who should not be reading about sex, let alone dabble in it, to the desolation of those who have the misfortune to be born.
The fathers are either tik addicts who have no business siring anyone, like Seraj, to the absent ones, like Selwyn, in the lives of their children.
The pain of Selwyn is an all too familiar happenstance - he is absent even in his presence. This leads to his twin son, Adam - the narrator, looking elsewhere for a father figure.
Even in the best of circumstances, under the love and care of step mother Natasha, Adam gradually goes to pot.
He chooses the cheap life of teen hoodlums, lured by Naldo, over battling the little problem of adding numbers for his school work. It is so easy for him to leave school, and yet the reality of the Cape Flats and all the other troubled communities is that children find no bigger motivation to leave school than what Adam finds attractive - the chance to have money in his pocket.
You will love the patience of Natasha, trying her best to be a pillar of strength for workshy Selwyn and his twin boy and girl.
If her unreciprocated love only happened on the pages of this book, it could have remained fiction. But the truth is that women like Natasha walks the streets of the Cape Flats in real life, trying their best to build families for broken men and the baggage of children they bring into new relationships.
What they get in return is not peculiar to the characters of Case’s book. The men run off with new, almost invariably, younger women.
Torn between two - the mother of the twins and the new woman in Selwyn’s life, Natasha is in a no-win spot of bother.
Adam descends into a life of crime. A man dies. The stable family Natasha dreamed of goes off like a puff of smoke in her face.
To lick her wounds she relocates to her sister in Kimberley.
This is contemporary Cape Town on the fringe of normalcy, complete with its crime and grime, the novelty of a new washing machine, the power of a Sassa card and the indiscriminate sound of gunfire.
The local patois is the cherry on top of a good account of life in the ghetto.
Full marks, Dianne Case.

[Jayne Bauling · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is superb and poignant literary YA fiction, authentically South African. The writing is beautiful, and the author has a sharp ear for dialogue.
The demoralizing realities of life in Manenberg are here: missing children, drugs, cruel and bloody backyard dog fights, vandalised schools, joblessness and poverty. Twins Adam and Jasmine know another life outside of Manenberg, with Daddy and Natasha in Goodwood, in a house with a beautiful garden, but here too the shadows are creeping closer, and not all is as Adam longs for it to be.
In their different ways, both Adam who obeys the rules, and Jasmine who doesn’t, dream of escape.
Adam is idealistic, and kind – to his friend Paullie, to his uncle’s abused dog Apollo – and you read desperately hoping he won’t lose his humanity along with the foreshadowed loss of innocence.
Jasmine is a hoarder, intent on amassing wealth, convinced this is the way to a better life.
Moving and profoundly sad.