Ron Charles reviews four new novels about boys from Africa and the Middle East

Thank you for using rssforward.com! This service has been made possible by all our customers. In order to provide a sustainable, best of the breed RSS to Email experience, we've chosen to keep this as a paid subscription service. If you are satisfied with your free trial, please sign-up today. Subscriptions without a plan would soon be removed. Thank you!

Errant boys have been running through our nation's best novels for a long time. Hemingway famously declared that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn'," and whether you agree with that or not, boys — and men who still act like them — demand a lot of attention in our canon. But this summer, the kids lighting out for the territory come from Africa and the Middle East, and their journeys will take you somewhere entirely different.
Enaiatollah Akbari was just 10 years old when his Afghani mother sneaked him into the busy city of Quetta, Pakistan, and abandoned him in 2000. Cruel as that sounds, it was an act of love by a woman desperate to protect her elder son from Pashtun gang members and the Taliban, who had already shot his teacher and closed their village school. "The thing is, I really wasn't expecting her to go," Akbari says at the opening of In the Sea There Are Crocodiles (Doubleday, $22.95). This gripping, strangely sweet tale is labeled "a novel," but it's essentially the memoir of a lost boy tossed from country to country for five years before finding sanctuary in Italy. There, a journalist named Fabio Geda befriended Akbari and won permission to write down his story.
Read full article >>


Howard Schneider 17 Aug, 2011


--
Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=a9f7b55bb7e2232c93ad7c33a145e66f
~
Manage subscription | Powered by rssforward.com