Book Review: The Girl Who Smiled Beads

The Girl Who Smiled Beads
A Story of War and What Comes After
by Clemantine Wamariya; Elizabeth Weil
Crown Publishing

Crown
Biographies & Memoirs
Pub Date 24 Apr 2018


I am reviewing a copy of The Girl Who Smiled Beads through Crown Publishing and Netgalley:


At six Clemantine Wamariya began to hear her parents started speaking in whispers, neighbors began to disappear and she heard the loud ugly sounds her brother tried to convince her was thunder. In 1994 she and her fifteen year old sister Claire fled the Rwanda Massacre and spent six years migrating through seven South African countries they were hungry, imprisoned and abused enduring and escaping Refugee Camps, they saw both the good and evil in people. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive.


When Clemantine was twelve she and her sister were given refuge status in the United States. In Chicago there lives diverged though they always remained close. Claire was a single Mother now, struggling to make ends meet. And Clemantine was taken in by a family who treated her as their own. She seemingly lived the American Dream becoming a cheerleader, attending private school even graduating from Yale. The years of hunger, abuse and terror could not be erased. She felt like a six year old and a hundred years at the same time.


Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of victim and transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershock.


I give The Girl Who Smiled Beads five out of five stars!


Happy Reading!