The Girl Who Smiled Beads
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4.6 • 7 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
A riveting story of dislocation, survival, and the power of stories to break or save us
When Clemantine Wamariya was six years old, her world was torn apart. She didn't know why her parents began talking in whispers, or why her neighbours started disappearing, or why she could hear distant thunder even when the skies were clear.
As the Rwandan civil war raged, Clemantine and her sister Claire were forced to flee their home. They ran for hours, then walked for days, not towards anything, just away. they sought refuge where they could find it, and escaped when refuge became imprisonment. Together, they experienced the best and the worst of humanity. After spending six years seeking refuge in eight different countries, Clemantine and Claire were granted refugee status in America and began a new journey.
Honest, life-affirming and searingly profound, this is the story of a girl's struggle to remake her life and create new stories - without forgetting the old ones.
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'Extraordinary and heartrending. Wamariya is as fiercely talented as she is courageous' JUNOT DIAZ, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
'Brilliant ... has captivated me for a couple of years' SELMA BLAIR
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wamariya, a human rights advocate, and Weil, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, tell the powerful story of Wamariya's experience fleeing Rwanda after the genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group began in 1994. While visiting her grandmother at age six, Wamariya and her older sister, Claire, were told to sneak out of the house after they heard a knock on the front door. For the next six years Wamariya and Claire crossed through at least seven countries, separated from their parents and living in refugee camps; when Wamariya was 12, they were granted asylum in the U.S. and landed in a safe home in Chicago. Wamariya was an ambitious student and even became interested in cheerleading. After graduating high school, she attended Yale, where she came to terms with the horrors she endured and read the works of Audre Lorde and W.G. Sebald (who taught her that "we live in all times and places at once"). At last, the sisters were reunited with their parents in 2006. This book is not a conventional story about war and its aftermath; it's a powerful coming-of-age story in which a girl explores her identity in the wake of a brutal war that destroyed her family and home. Wamariya is an exceptional narrator and her story is unforgettable.
