Omar El Akkad

A beautifully penned, suspenseful story of a Syrian boy landing on a Greek island after a nightmare trip from Alexandria, jammed into a decrepit fishing boat. He meets a local girl named Vänna Hermes, who rescues the boy from pursuing soldiers. The point of view moves to the colonel who "ignores the hustler who walks the beach with a cigarette-girl tray hanging over his chest, selling watered-down sunscreen and sunflower seeds in violation of local ordinance. He simply stares out at the sea, lets it blur and double in his vision until it swallows the land and the sky, until there is nothing else. This arpeggio spring. April staircasing away. It used to feel smoother, the ending of winter, the island in rebirth." Those Greek tourist beaches are momentarily closed while men in hazmat suits clean up the dead and their debris after the sinking of the overloaded fishing boat offshore. The only survivor appears to be a nine-year-old boy. The book flies along with its alternating stories on board the boat and on the island with regard for these helpless fleeing children until its surprise ending. The climax troubled me, but what alternative could have contained this story?
As Ron Charles reviews this title in the Washington Post: " Nothing I’ve read before has given me such a visceral sense of the grisly predicament confronted by millions of people expelled from their homes by conflict and climate change. Though “What Strange Paradise” celebrates a few radical acts of compassion, it does so only by placing those moments of moral courage against a vast ocean of cruelty." https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/what-strange-paradise-omar-el...… (mere)

Amir is a 9-year old Syrian boy who survives a shipwreck. Everyone else to be seen has washed up on shore, dead. He is on an island, but doesn’t know where he is, nor does he understand the language. When two men see him and point and shout, Amir gets scared and runs. He runs into Vanna, 15-years old and though they are unable to communicate verbally, she hides him.

The story then shifts to “Before”, which brings us up to date on how Amir got where he is. We go back and forth between Amir’s before and “After”. Much of after is told from Vanna’s POV, but occasionally we switch to the POV of a colonial who is dead set on finding Amir, the little boy who ran away.

Given that it’s (primarily) from a 9-year old’s POV, it took a bit to figure out what was going on through much of the story. I am still not sure I understand the ending. But it was a “good” (powerful) story, even so.… (mere)