Review by Booklist Review
ldquo;But I want to be the one who forges my own instruments of survival. I want my heart to be the headquarters of my stories." So declares Selam Asmelash, a preternaturally gifted observer of her Ethiopian family and community during the socialist revolution of the 1970s and '80s. Narrating initially from the womb, Selam chronicles the tempestuous marriage of her parents--her passive father, Asmelash, scion of a respected land-owning family, and mother, Degitu, a fierce upstart who fights a lifetime of losing battles with her husband--as well as the gossiping women of her village and her country's leaders. Selam inherits her mother's combative spirit and imagines herself as a leopard (a skin condition produces her spots), calmly planning which of her enemies she will eat first. And there are adversaries aplenty as the family loses their land to socialism, their coffee business to vengeful neighbors, and their traditions to evangelical Christian proselytizers. As Selam comes-of-age, her ferocious resistance to the world's absurd cruelty leads her to defy controlling brothers, petty politicians, and village lunkheads, even taking up arms against God, the ultimate capricious authority. Sibaht tells Selan's tale with verve, offering a vibrant panorama of Ethiopian society in all its complexity with an unforgettable protagonist at the center.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Sibhat debuts with a remarkable family saga set in Ethiopia's communist period. In the mid-1980s, 42-year-old Degitu Galata learns--after four months of unexplained vaginal bleeding--that she's pregnant with her third child and first in 11 years. Meanwhile, her wastrel husband, Asmelash Gebre Egziabher, perpetually runs afoul of their region's new socialist leaders. Shortly after Degitu gives birth to a daughter named Selam, the family's boarder introduces them to Pentecostal Christianity. Then Degitu's bleeding returns and she dies, though the family tells Selam, now a toddler, that she's moved to Addis Ababa. Asmelash throws himself into the new religion despite harassment from neighbors, while Selam is mistreated by her older brothers (the oldest, Ezra, who is secretly gay and carrying on a relationship with the boarder, takes Selam's share of their late grandmother's money to open a shop in Addis Ababa, and Melkamu beats Selam while forcing exorcisms on her in the church). As rebels make progress toppling the government, Selam uncovers the secret of her mother's death and the family experiences another tragedy. Sibhat wonderfully distills the political and historical context into a personal story, and centers Selam's emotional turmoil with inventive narration ("I'm a leopard in disguise, with a list of all the people I'm going to eat in this town"). This is a standout. Agent: Ayesha Pande, Ayesha Pande Literary Agency. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In Ethiopian writer Sibhat's debut novel, a young girl chronicles civil war and ethnic division in the 1980s. Selam Asmelash comes into the world with what, says a sister, is "a very large, abnormally sized head." Her father asks what's the matter with that, and the sibling, as if a sibyl, replies, "You'll see." Selam's appearance will later prove a cause for schoolyard bullying, but for the moment, thoughtful beyond her years, she decides on a couple of things: She's not going to walk until she's good and ready, and she's not going to be fooled by political rhetoric, as when, still a toddler, she proclaims of the new constitutional freedoms "Comrade Chairman" promises over the radio, "Liar." Selam is not the only one resisting the alternate realities the regime promotes: Her grandmother, for example, holds up a black bar of soap sold in a government shop and demands of the dictator in faraway Addis Ababa, "He needs to tell us whether this is really soap or his shit in a package!" Selam, the conscience of the tale, finds her bête noire in, appropriately enough, a government functionary whom she calls Rectangle-Head, but there are other foes: the villagers who throw rocks at their house because her family is Protestant; the rebel army that arrives during an uprising against the regime, so quick to commit atrocities that, says Selam, "I am terrified of them even more than I used to be of comrade Rectangle-Head, whom I don't even think about anymore." Long since fully ambulatory, Selam, in Sibhat's touching conclusion, puts aside these murderous squabbles of adults as the childish things they are and decides instead that she's going to be a star soccer striker, scoring goals for all the dead of her family and village and even one for God, "the madman who created so much chaos while desperate to escape aloneness." A moving evocation of life in a time of terror, as seen through innocent eyes. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
