Publisher: Simon and Schuster Canada, August 10th 2021

Format: Paperback 

Pages: 384

Rating: 4/5 stars

Synopsis (from Goodreads):

Peter Orner, author of Am I Alone Here, coming-of-age tale follows a young man who is forced to flee his homeland of Rwanda during the Civil War and make sense of his reality.

Nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, not even the people in it. The most one can do is make some sort of start and then work toward some kind of ending.

One might as well start with Séraphin: playlist-maker, nerd-jock hybrid, self-appointed merchant of cool, Rwandan, stifled and living in Windhoek, Namibia. Soon he will leave the confines of his family life for the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town, in South Africa, where loyal friends, hormone-saturated parties, adventurous conquests, and race controversies await. More than that, his long-awaited final year in law school promises to deliver a crucial puzzle piece of the Great Plan immigrant: a degree from a prestigious university.

But a year is more than the sum of its parts, and en route to the future, the present must be lived through and even the past must be survived.

My Review:

Thank you Simon and Schuster Canada for the copy of this book.
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Read if you like: character driven stories.
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This book follows the main protagonist, Seraphin, as he is finishing up law school in South Africa and is trying to figure out what he wants to do next. The book goes back and forth between his childhood, when he started college, and the present. Seraphin is an interesting character because he is Rwandan, living in Namibia, and going to school in South Africa.
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The book explores family, migration, identity and raise in a poignant way. The writing was beautiful and literary. One of my favourite parts was reading about how his parents went to France to escape Rwanda and it’s traditions, but then ended up meeting and falling in love with each other!
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CW: sexual content, racism, sexism, war, death.