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The Orchard Of Lost Souls (2014)

by Nadifa Mohamed(Favorite Author)

3.84 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0374209146 (ISBN13: 9780374209148)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: This book was gorgeously done. For such a harrowing and heartbreaking period, the author brought out a hope for the future in so many ways. A family for one. Redemption for another. And a new, replacement daughter for the third. These three women are from such different backgrounds and stages of life, but they each have a coming of age story here that brings them together in the end. The structure was so creative, following them separately but simultaneously together to start, then each women's separate journey towards the inevitable, and ending with their eventual joining. With such different viewpoints of the same events, one can really get an idea of how the currents in Somalia at the time were ebbing and flowing around each other. And while showing such disaster... more and destruction and death, the author manages to also portray why any given person would want to keep fighting and rise above the atrocity. Beautifully written and intensely felt.
review 2: I enjoyed this book more than "Black Mamba boy". I found it difficult to catch up with the many characters introduced in the opening chapter but once I got into the first character's story everything flowed together nicely. Its 1988 in Hargeisa, on the surface we have a Somalia in which tribal strife has been replaced with Somali's treating eachother as "comrades", a sense of unity under the father of Somalia who has taken power under what was a military coup. This books manages to peel back the layers on this false utopia to show what happens as Somalia deteriorates in the aftermath of the losses experienced in the Ogaden war. It further demonstrates what lengths a dictator is willing to go to in order to hold on to his power and how ordinary humans can be transformed in times of chaos. During the day there are songs praising the country and its leader but at night the curfews get earlier and earlier, elders are beaten, students are dragged in the streets, innocent people are jailed, villagers accused of helping the "terrorists" are ransacked,a girl burns herself on fire. This book follows the lives of an orphaned refugee girl, a young women in the Somali National Army and a woman who has lost both her husband and child as their country slowly spirals out of control. less

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