![]() This incandescent portrait of suburbia and family, creativity, and consumerism burns bright. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.Ĭorrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. ![]() The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. ![]() Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Nuri wants to be the strong one, but Lefteri subtly, slowly shows the reader how deep his wounds are as well.Ī well-crafted structure and a troubled but engaging narrator power this moving story of Syrian refugees.Įdgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages. Lefteri says in her author’s note that the book was inspired by her volunteer work in a refugee camp in Athens, and Nuri’s story rings with authenticity, from the vast, impersonal cruelties of war to the tiny kindnesses that help people survive it. Along the way, he also becomes the guardian of Mohammed, a lost boy about the same age as Sami. The war leaves Nuri and Afra no choice but to leave, but her blindness and emotional trauma mean that he must be her caretaker as well as grappling with the bewildering navigation to another country. In Aleppo, Afra was an artist Nuri was the titular beekeeper, a job he loved, in business with his cousin and dearest friend, Mustafa. Nuri narrates the book its chapters alternate gracefully among the golden prewar past, the struggle to gain legal refugee status in England in the present, and the journey in between, a long nightmare of chaotically crowded refugee camps, life-threatening sea crossings, and smugglers eager to exploit them. The novel follows Nuri and Afra Ibrahim as they escape from Aleppo and make the perilous journey to Britain after their son, Sami, dies. ![]() Politics are barely mentioned in the book, though-when war has destroyed your home and livelihood, blinded your wife and killed your young son, the reasons for that war lose their meaning. This novel’s characters are fleeing a different war, the current, devastating civil war in Syria. ![]() Lefteri ( A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible, 2011) is the child of refugees, raised in London after her parents fled Cyprus in the 1970s. The human stories behind news images of Syrian war refugees emerge in a novel both touching and terrifying. ![]()
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