...[an] immersive, exhilarating memoir ...This memoir adds an essential voice to the genre of migrant literature, challenging false popular narratives that migration is optional, permanent and always results in a better life.

... a book of gripping realism.

In the final pages, Moore brings 5-year-old Tutu back to narrate the reunion with Mam. Told in spare, childlike prose, the scene is vivid and heart-shattering. (Full disclosure: When I read that section aloud to my husband, we both cried.) Moore’s gorgeously rendered memoir is an exhortation not to surrender to tragedy fatigue. There are so many stories of war and forced migration that they may, at a distance, blur into sameness. But zoom in and those abstractions sharpen into singular stories, each one a complicated blend of loss and salvation, tragedy and triumph, bitterness and wisdom..

I recommend reading the dialogue aloud to approximate the effect of the lyrical rhythms of speech. As the days and weeks of escape drag on, Moore employs an effective technique for conveying the monotony of boredom—and terror—with epic run-on sentences, stretching for pages.

Recounting her childhood experience during the Liberian Civil War, Moore’s (She Would Be King) memoir takes readers from a child’s journey to a mother’s memory, recounting the horrors of her family’s flight to safety, the displacement of diaspora, and the everyday challenges of being African in America.

In this beautiful memoir of dislocation, a young girl flees war-torn Liberia with her family to America.

A lyrical reckoning with the aftermath of civil war.