Ishmael Beah's Little Family

Yesterday I spent an hour enraptured by the online interview with novelist Ishmael Beah that was hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore in DC. Anyone can access their author events or get on their mailing list and oh, they have so much going on! https://www.politics-prose.com/event/book/pp-live-ishmael-beah-little-family-in-conversation-reza-aslan The back and forth between Beah and Reza Aslan made me appreciate this book all over again as if I was reading it for the first time.

I had the distinct pleasure of reviewing this and Beah's previous novel, The Radiance of Tomorrow, for Library Journal and I loved them both. You may remember Ishmael Beah's name as the young man who tore our hearts open with his 2007 memoir Long Way Gone, his cathartic take on being conscripted as a twelve-year-old child soldier during the civil war in his home country Sierra Leone. Fifteen years later he is a living success story, a husband and father living here in the United States, and a writer who gets better with each literary outing.

Little Family tells the story of five lost and abandoned children who live in a derelict airplane in an unnamed African country where they form a de facto

family unit led by the bookish but street-smart Elimane, the oldest at twenty, and mothered by Khoudiemata, barely a teen herself but wise beyond her years. The five are grifters, they survive by their wits, conning, stealing, and getting away with it because they are invisible to society. To Beah and to readers though, these children are distinct and complicated and a joy to spend time with even as we worry that at any moment their delicate house of cards will come tumbling down.

Elimane takes a gamble on a business relationship with a dubious man, William Handkerchief, who could be a government informant or the head of a criminal syndicate. Khoudi, because of her innate beauty, gets the attention of a posse of wealthy jet-setting young people from whom she won't be able to keep her secret life hidden. As they let down their guard, the all too human Elimane and Khoudi may be endangering the little family unit they've worked so hard to protect. 

This was my verdict on this gorgeous book: 

 “Beah portrays his characters with exquisite tenderness, imbuing them with a grace that belies their wretched situation… In a work less harrowing but no less effective than Radiance of Tomorrow, Beah continues to speak eloquently to the impact of colonialism on generations of African children for whom freedom is merely an illusion.” – Library Journal

If I ever get up the courage to go out again, maybe to the post office? I would love to share my copy with someone. Let me know if you're interested.