The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 18 February 2020
by Nafkote Tamirat
Much as we liked to have thought that we were invincible and we knew everything when we were in high school (remember all that certainty about the world and what it owed us?), our grasp on the doings of the people around us, the people who most affected us, was at best oblique and incomplete. The author of this novel brilliantly conveys that imperfect picture, so that, while we may have a reliable narrator, she doesn't have a reliable grasp on the undercurrents of the story in which she is engaged. Our unnamed narrator is a teenaged girl, growing up in the Ethiopian expatriate community that is well-established in Boston. Her once-reliable mother is absent. Her once-absent father is returned. The former is missed, and the latter is ill-equipped to parent a girl in the process of establishing her own identity. But that identity is driven, somewhat, by the inconsistent nature of her home. Like many young people, she is seeking a parental figure who genuinely lavishes attention upon her.
This desire, however, is the kind of thing that drives the charismatic draw of cult leaders. Not that that is necessarily where this story is going. Our heroine meets Ayale, a man older than her father and employed as a parking lot attendant somewhere not far from downtown Boston. His central location gives Ayale the opportunity to operate as a kind of fixer in his community. He facilitates deals, bestows the gifts he affords from the minor grift in the way he operates the parking lot. He is also smart, charming, and challenges our protagonist to do well in school, develop her independence, and achieve some success in her life. This is the kind of encouragement she neither recieves nor necessarily would accept from her wayward father and missing mother. She excels, but also picks up a smoking habit and works a small delivery job for Ayale, never knowing quite what it is she is delivering.
Ethiopia is a troubled land. It has a brutal colonial history, from the Italians to a series of autocratic emporers. There has been infamous famine there, and the land has been united and divided over the years. Its emigrant communities will, no doubt, be steeped in their country's history and driven, perhaps, by hopes for its future. Ayale is a player here, aspiring to a kind of greatness belied by his job down at the parking lot. Ultimately, our protagonist begins to get hints of Ayale's underworld projects, and her own complicity in them. She is threatened by shadowy figures on the fringes of her community, but never fully understands her own culpability, either legally, or in Ayale's grift. This shift in her understanding leads to one of the most compelling and shocking story twists this reader has encountered. One doesn't want to give it away, though it is even in the opening pages that this is hinted at. After all, we begin by meeting our narrator on an unnamed Caribbean island commune with definite but yet unstable plans set irrevocably in motion.