April 15, 2020
A lyrical reckoning with the aftermath of civil war. The first Liberian civil war was a disaster for the people of Liberia, including Moore and her family. Only 5 years old at the time, she was forced to flee her home on foot alongside her family as rebels advanced down her street, guns firing. After weeks of walking, they found relative safety in the village of Lai, near the border with Sierra Leone, where they would remain for seven months. When a rebel arrived in Lai promising to sneak Moore's family into Sierra Leone, the author breaks the narrative, jumping ahead 25 years to the mid-2010s. At that time, she lived in Brooklyn, and things were not going well. She was stalled on a novel (perhaps her acclaimed 2018 book She Would Be King). Amid the racial tensions following the highly publicized deaths of black citizens at the hands of police officers, she broke up with her white boyfriend after he insulted her, and she was having nightmares and considering returning to Liberia for the first time since she was a girl. This section drags a bit, as Moore's problems take on a developed-nation air, especially in light of the chapters that preceded them. But for the remainder of the book, the author confronts the legacy of the war for her family and her country, trying in particular to understand the rebel woman who led her surviving family to safety. As Moore conducts this investigation in earnest, she writes a long section of the text in the voice of her mother. It reads like fiction in the sense that the author's inhabiting of her mother's character is absolute. Nonfiction purists might balk at this liberty, but the resulting intimacy is profound. Here and throughout, Moore's control of language is impressive. Formally dazzling yet coolly reflective prose makes for a refined memoir.

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Starred review from May 4, 2020
In this beautiful memoir of dislocation, a young girl flees war-torn Liberia with her family to America. Moore (She Would Be King) begins with herself as a five-year-old living with her sisters, grandparents, and father in Monrovia. When the 1990 civil war erupts with terrifying massacres by rebels overthrowing president Samuel Doe (who Moore imagines as “the Hawa Undu dragon, the monster in my dreams, the sum of stories I was too young to hear”), the family heads for Sierra Leone, hoping to get to America. Moore describes this desperate trek in the lyrical voice of her younger self, a dreamy girl who filters the danger through a folktale lens. The middle section tracks her childhood after her family resettles in Texas, then her trauma-plagued young adulthood in Brooklyn (“nightmares were old friends”), and racially fraught romances (“I never feared my blackness, until the men,” referring to the black men she first dated in college). The book’s final section holds a mirror to the first, describing in her mother’s voice her mother’s journey from New York back to Africa to rescue her lost family. Building to a thrumming crescendo, the pages almost fly past. Readers will be both enraptured and heartbroken by Moore’s intimate yet epic story of love for family and home.

Starred review from June 1, 2020

Recounting her childhood experience during the Liberian Civil War, Moore's (She Would Be King) memoir takes readers from a child's journey to a mother's memory, recounting the horrors of her family's flight to safety, the displacement of diaspora, and the everyday challenges of being African in America. Opening with her father's decision to flee with his three young daughters and their grandparents, Moore describes the weeks-long journey (and the horrors witnessed) with a lyric quality that reads like a fireside story. She then describes the different "seasons" of her life, considering her experience as an African among African Americans, and what it's like to date well-meaning white men, before inevitably asking the question that continues to haunt her: Why her mother was in America when her family's lives were torn apart. VERDICT Moore's narrative style shines, weaving moments of lightness into a story of pain and conflict, family and war, loss and reunion. Recommended for readers of women's stories and those interested in learning about African lived experience both on the continent and in the diaspora.--Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib., Miami

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Starred review from June 1, 2020
Moore follows her stunning first novel, She Would Be King (2018), with a debut memoir anchored in her family's experiences in the Liberian civil war. Abruptly forced out of their settled lives in Monrovia, the Moore family?three young girls with their father, grandmother, and caregiver?endured a three-week trek to the family village of Lai. Moore is masterful in re-creating her five-year-old self's perception of this chaotic and scary journey, while the aching desire to be with their mother, Mam, a visiting Fulbright scholar in the U.S., is a continuous dream for all the girls. Mam does return for her family, and helps them leave via Sierra Leone, and reach Texas, and Moore's subsequent life as an African immigrant. Identity, family ties, heroism, and gender roles are beautifully woven into Moore's fable-like narrative, in which she uses dragons to express the nature of power and the inevitability of political corruption. Moore's return to Liberia as an adult brings the story full circle as she muses over how some dark stories need to be buried for a country to move forward. Moore's observation that the best stories do not always end happily, but happiness will find its way in there somehow captures the emotional complexity of this powerful, stirring, and imaginatively allegorical memoir.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)