A review by black_girl_reading
North of Dawn by Nuruddin Farah

4.0

This lovely book was my first written by a Somalian and also my first situated in Norway, and so I spent a fair bit of the book trying to place the abruptness of the language, which was also unfamiliar to me. About a Norwegian-Somali family that is forever changed by the addition of the wife of their late jihadist son, and his two step children to their numbers, I came to appreciate the directness of the writing, particularly as the topic itself was so complex and multilayered. The book explored grief and violence and fundamentalism and the resiliency and adaptability of the human spirit, and the immense lovability of precious, precocious, changing children. This book was dedicated to Farah’s own younger sister who was killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul, and I felt the enormity of his loss, and appreciated so much that he was still able to explore the nuances that shape the path of folks towards extremism, or away from it, without making any broad generalizations about individual character or creating easy answers about why this happens. This book was unresolved in so many ways, and that was okay. In the end, I read a family shrinking and growing and ebbing and flowing and adjusting and progressing and regressing and being. I read intertwined lives. I read a lovely consideration of an important topic in a measured and thoughtful prose.