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A review by readingwithhippos
The Boat People by Sharon Bala
5.0
Considering the current crisis at the U.S./Mexico border, with children being separated from parents and asylum seekers being treated like criminals, this seems like a good time to learn what it’s like to be a refugee. Although Bala’s book is set Canada, not the U.S., and her characters are from Sri Lanka, not Mexico and Central America, the themes of the novel felt highly relevant to me. It doesn’t matter what language you speak or what culture you come from, the desperation that comes from leaving your home and throwing yourself on the mercy of people who may not have any is universal.
What makes The Boat People so affecting, I think, are the multiple perspectives. You really get to see the issue from all angles, from the suffering Mahindan and his family endured in Sri Lanka, to Priya’s struggle to find her place in her career, to Grace’s confused floundering as she weighs the migrants’ fates. While I was certainly not a reader without an agenda--my views on immigration and how we should treat people who come here seeking a new life are already firm--I appreciated how nuanced Bala’s treatment of her characters is.
I think my main takeaway from The Boat People is that bureaucracy is inadequate to address immigration. We like bureaucracy because it attempts to make tidy what is impossibly untidy. It turns people into paper, and paper we can crumple up and toss away. The problem is that people are not paper. Rubber-stamp decisions have real consequences. It’s easy to hate the abstract idea of an immigrant. It’s much harder to hate a person you’ve gotten to know.
More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com
What makes The Boat People so affecting, I think, are the multiple perspectives. You really get to see the issue from all angles, from the suffering Mahindan and his family endured in Sri Lanka, to Priya’s struggle to find her place in her career, to Grace’s confused floundering as she weighs the migrants’ fates. While I was certainly not a reader without an agenda--my views on immigration and how we should treat people who come here seeking a new life are already firm--I appreciated how nuanced Bala’s treatment of her characters is.
I think my main takeaway from The Boat People is that bureaucracy is inadequate to address immigration. We like bureaucracy because it attempts to make tidy what is impossibly untidy. It turns people into paper, and paper we can crumple up and toss away. The problem is that people are not paper. Rubber-stamp decisions have real consequences. It’s easy to hate the abstract idea of an immigrant. It’s much harder to hate a person you’ve gotten to know.
More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com