“During my second week on the island, I woke up in the witching hour between night and day and saw the sky divided into pink, orange, and gold. The lines between each were jagged but distinct, and I realized that this probably happened all the time, I’d just been sleeping through it. It made me hope that I would have something to look forward to.
When I indulge in this crepuscular glory (the colors always differ, the patterns sometimes less defined) it’s easier to believe that I’m here by choice. It’s only when the sun comes out and my father silently rises from bed that I know I have once again been fooled. More infuriating is the knowledge that come the next dawn, I’ll be fooled once more.
I’m beginning to feel old.”
Our unnamed narrator is a high school aged girl who finds herself with her Father in a secret Island community established by representatives of the Ethiopian diaspora. We learn, over time, that their presence on the island isn’t completely unforeseen; over the past several years, she has ingratiated herself to a man named Ayale, virtually the king of the Ethiopian underworld of Boston, and the presumed leader of this island community.
Our narrator is now essentially held captive with her father, a man with whom she has a complicated relationship.
“It hasn’t escaped my notice that while the others persist in treating me like a plague victim, my father has only to tinker with an object for ten seconds before, hey presto, he’s the goddamn Messiah. I don’t like that people are gravitating toward him, asking him for counsel, blatantly fucking liking him. I’m sorry, but that’s not who we are and that’s not what we do: we’re supposed to be ignored and all the better for it. Nonetheless, he continues to betray me with his popularity. I don’t know why I expected otherwise. I don’t know how I could have forgotten and let myself love him so recklessly.”
The narrator embodies the spirit and essence of the novel – detachment. As a child of immigrants, as a precocious and rebellious teenager, as a member of a diaspora, she is set apart and always at a remove from the world around her.
“I had never been to Ethiopia, and didn’t much care that I hadn’t; I just assumed it would happen one day. Whenever a teacher first heard my name and feigned curiosity as to its origins, starting or ending with an insincere ‘It’s so pretty!’ I wanted to protest, I’m American! What’s an Ethiopia? How does one come to be there? How does one come to leave it to go to an America? But in truth, I was only almost American, so I gave my explanations and nothing else of myself until the bell rang.”
The challenge of writing a novel about detachment, of course, is that it strains to engage the reader in a meaningful way. From the narrator’s tone to the shadowed ways in which the plot was revealed, this book was well-written certainly, but far from gripping. Where I had hoped for a searing peek at a subculture thriving in and around Boston, the book’s disorienting atmosphere left me a bit cold and disconnected.
Thank you to Henry Holt for providing an Advance Reader’s Copy
in exchange for a fair and honest review.
