⭐️⭐️⭐️ I picked the book up at random when visiting a Waterstones. I think the title, which alludes to the first book in the Adrian Mole series, made me chuckle as well as interested me.

It is a recreation of the diaries of a English Pakistani comedian. From what I gathered from the intro, he recreated it by mapping out the timeline of his youth and memories. If includes references to family event and real-life news events as well.

The first thing to say is that is it a serious book, with comic undertones, which are due to the fact that the writer is a genuinely funny person. As a kid he played many pranks on people, including family, classmates and teachers. Some are harmless amusing, and in others he learns lessons.

Tez comes across as a very fair and honest character. He is a devout Muslim and, during the course of the story, chooses to take his religion seriously. You may think that this would make for a dry read, but you would be wrong. It’s heartfelt and witty, and there are some great moments too when he points out some contradictions in behaviour between how people should behave and how they actually behave.

He also had a tough family life. The rare visits to see family in Pakistan are joyous, especially his sister’s wedding, but his relationship with his stepfather is tragic (mainly because the guy comes across as an absolute asshole). There is a brief moment of joy when it seems like this situation is resolved, but then, a few pages later, normality returns.

I have a couple of minor niggles. The first is the sheer number of characters. This is something that cannot be resolved, because he comes from a large family. There is a glossary of characters at the front, but if you nipped to the front of the book every time you are not sure who someone is, you will constantly be page hopping. I decided eventually to not bother, and still got the gist of the story.

The other (bigger) niggle is the use of Pakistani terms throughout the book. This is, in itself, not a problem, because the first time that a non-English word is used there is an asterisk and a helpful translation (and for several of the words you can work out the gist from context). The problem is that the translation is not at the bottom of the page where it should be, it’s in another glossary at the end. So between working out which character is which and what certain words mean, you ed up having to consult both glossaries, one at the front, one at the back, which was quite frustrating. The actual book was highly enjoyable but the format of the translations was tedious. The translations should have been on the page that they first appeared on. The first part of the book is obviously the heaviest for these and as such I really struggled to get into it. I have literally knocked a star from my review because of this, it almost caused me to give up in the early stages, although I am glad that I did not.

But overall it was a great read. It’s fascinating and informative to see the race issues we obviously have in this country from the point of view of the minority. The story is in places sweet, sad, uplifting and shocking. It’s starts when Tez is a kid, and ends with him leaving home to go to University. I hope there is a second book, I will enjoy reading “The Growing Pains Of Tez Ilyas” but can the publisher please put any translations on the page the word actually appears on… thanks!

Loved this book! Jam packed with both funny & sad stories, literally laughing at one page and sobbing at the next. Heaps of nostalgia too for me having grown up in Blackburn around the same time.