I HOPE YOU FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR, historical novel of ripples from 1990s seismic shifts

I HOPE YOU FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
BSRAT MEZGHEBE
Liveright/Well-Read Black Girl Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A radiant, highly anticipated debut from the Well-Read Black Girl Books series, delving into the secret lives of three women on the eve of Eritrean independence.

The year is 1991. Eritrea is on the verge of liberation from Ethiopian rule and in Washington, D.C.’s tight–knit Eritrean community, change is in the air. Thirteen–year–old Lydia and her family are grappling with what peace—after decades of war—might mean for their future, just as they welcome a new relative into their distant cousin, Berekhet, newly arrived from Ethiopia to attend medical school.

Berekhet encourages Lydia to confront a barrage of new ideas for the first time, about nationhood, family, and what it means to be truly free. Meanwhile, her mother, Elsa, a former rebel fighter, and the family matriarch, Mama Zewdi, contend with regrets and secrets long-buried secrets that the emboldened Lydia is determined to uncover, including the truth about her martyred father. Written with warmth and sharp humor, Bsrat Mezghebe’s mesmerizing debut novel is a loving ode to an immigrant community on the cusp of a new age.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I dated an Eritrean immigrant to Texas in the 1980s. I had not heard of Eritrean independence movements before meeting him. Brief as it was (internalized homophobia caused much pain), this connection left me with an acute awareness of how very much the people of a particular place have ideas and emotions about the notion "home" that I can never know I don't know about unless I meet them. As there are only so many ways to meet Othered people on a footing that does not read as exoticizing them, I got more interested in reading about these folks. It's also when I became really serious about making a point to read translated literature.

Lydia, our main PoV character, is oddly enough in the same boat I was vis-à-vis her own family. Elsa gave birth to her in Eritrea but emigrated immediately thereafter; Lydia does not know exactly why, but reckons it has to do with her father's death before she was born. The novel is built around her teenager's need to discover The Truth℠ (as if such a thing exists!) about her parents and thus her own past.

There are chapters from Elsa's PoV, and Elsa's close-as-a-sister, distant cousin, and fellow emigrant from the war zone "Mama" (as Lydia calls her, along with the others in their close-knit community) Zewdi Naizghi. All these women are fully in charge of their survival in the US, relying on themselves and each other; men are relegated to margins and edges of lives they are constructing for themselves. The first rock dropped in this relatively calm pond is Mama Zewdi's borning interest in a man who wants her to come to California to be with him, the second is the arrival from Addis Ababa of eighteen-year-old cousin Berekhet, who's sent there from a need to have doctors for newly-independent Eritrea.

All these volatilities in place and all stemming from the successful struggle for independence, there is a reckoning to be had among these women...with the past, with the demands of life in a new world meeting the needs of the old world's ties and tumult, with the conscious desire to form an identity rooted in one's past but portable into a future of one's own design. It is here I felt debut Author Mezghebe fell into an understandable cognitive dissonance. She definitely needed to set the stage for some Eritrean revelations. The clues she scattered were a bit too obviously clues. I can't cite my examples because I live in quaking terror of the Spoiler Stasi. The fact is they were overly set up as clues; it's a forgivable sin in a debut novel. I can't give her the perfect five her character-building work and her hunger-inducing facility with food description would've merited on its own.

I can happily and very slightly forcefully encourage you to get the story into your head. I was deeply invested in Lydia's borning identity, I was so annoyed at everyone demanding Mama Zewdi's attention, I was so keen to know what was powering Elsa's slightly off actions. I didn't get *as* invested in Berekhet, but I don't think I was meant to.

What I was offered in this read was the interesting idea that the past an immigrant brings to their new country does not necessarily require them to amputate it to become intentionally of their new home; but not reckoning with that past will effectively block any sense of belonging anywhere...including one's own family.

Supporting this debut novelist with your attention will reward you with outsized new ideas about the driving forces behind immigrants' decisions to move to a new country, about the consequential, inescapable role one's personal past plays in the rest of one's life, and about family's meanings and mutabilities.