What I’m Reading (3.6.23)

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya (★★★☆☆)

Audiobook • Libby • Nonfiction (Memoir) • 2018

Short synopsis: Clemantine was 6 years old in 1994 when the Rwandan Genocide caused her and her older sister to flee their home and spend the next 6 years wandering throughout Africa, living in and fleeing from different refugee camps along the way. When she was 12, she and her sister were granted asylum in the United States, and there, Clemantine was safe but had to learn a whole new way of life: a new language, new customs, new cities, new families. The Girl Who Smiled Beads discusses the true cost of war and its aftershocks.

I have very complicated feelings about this book. I always have a hard time rating memoirs because these are people’s real lives and they are inviting us into their deepest thoughts and feelings. For me, this book felt a bit chaotic and Clemantine was a very hard person to connect with. The book jumped back and forth in time, starting with Clemantine’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006 and then immediately pulling us back into the earliest memories of the author’s life. I was never excited to listen to this audiobook, forcing myself to push through it because it’s such a beloved memoir and I thought I was missing something. In the end, it just didn’t work for me. I thought Clemantine was so, so angry throughout the whole book. And she is entitled to this anger! She has lived through a genocide. But what purpose is it serving her life to continue to be so angry? While I didn’t expect a neat and tidy ending, I still wanted a little introspection from the author on her anger (or hell, at least some mentions of going to therapy), but we never got that. We just got a rather unstructured, chaotic book about her journey to where she is today and why nobody else in the world can understand her (not even her sister or her mother). I also wish there had been more discussion of the Rwandan Genocide. While the author did a great job of expressing how this crisis affected her country (refugee camps, little to no food, constant terror), I think it would have been helpful to bring us into how the genocide happened and how Rwandans responded. But I guess I can just read Wikipedia for that info.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (★★★☆☆)

Print • Library • Fiction • 2022

Short synopsis: For nearly all of Bird Gardner’s life, society has been ruled by PACT, the Preserving American Culture & Traditions Act. Anything anti-American, like books written by or about Asian-Americans, is destroyed. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment with his father and disavows his mother, who left them when Bird was nine. But a mysterious note will take Bird on a journey to find his mother again.

I really, really enjoyed the first 1/3 of this novel, which follows Bird’s perspective. I found this world Ng created to be both interesting and slightly terrifying because this near-future dystopian novel felt too much like our world right now. Empty school bookshelves, getting rid of any books that discuss a certain race, highly monitoring what people are doing and saying. When the story jumps to Bird’s mom’s perspective, the book started to fall apart for me. It felt like Ng was spending too much time trying to be literary and the book suffered because of it. For one, she decided to not use quotation marks when characters were speaking. (WHY?!) She wrote in sentence fragments and poetic prose that just didn’t work for me, and made me roll my eyes more than a few times. The ending was… fine. I was hoping it would tie things together in a more interesting way, but the book really just ended and that was that. All in all, my least favorite book by her. I appreciate what she tried to do with this novel, but I think her strength lies in character studies, not societal analyses.

After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina M. Lopez (★★☆☆☆)

E-Book • Libby • Contemporary Romance • 2022

Short synopsis: Alex is back home after 12 years away and this time, she’s on a mission to save her grandma’s bar that has been bleeding money for months. Standing in her way? Jeremiah, the local professor who is interested in buying the bar to turn it into a historical museum. But when a property developer might steal the bar out from under them, Alex and Jeremiah must join forces to stop them.

There was so much I disliked about this book. I should have abandoned it, but I didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever hated a FMC as much as I hated Alex. She was rude and mean and incredibly judgmental. She didn’t give a single person in her life the benefit of the doubt, but expected those around her to do so for her. I couldn’t understand what Jeremiah saw in her. What drew him to her, other than her looks? She was so damn rude to him again and again and again! It made it so hard for me to believe in and root for their relationship. The secondary plot about Alex’s grandma’s bar and making sure it didn’t fall into nefarious hands was really, really boring. I just didn’t care about it at all! There were even some cool elements like secret passageways and bootleggers and 1920s-era whiskey and I. Just. Didn’t. Care. This book was overly long, Alex’s emotional arc didn’t endear me to her at all, and I just cannot in good conscience recommend this book.

What are you reading?