PositiveThe Johannesburg Review of BooksThis is not your traditional immigrant novel: Somali–Italian Scego creates something more shifting, more difficult to pin down ... True, we find the regular anecdotes of the outsider in its pages—hair conformity troubles, menial jobs, passport worries, and so on. But Scego is more concerned with turning the telescope the other way, towards the swirling insides of quietly eccentric family members, generational debts accruing interest, and the sins of the mothers ... Scego, like Toni Morrison, populates her fictional universe with crippled survivors and the ghosts that plague them ... In a novel of such grand measure, the best moments in Beyond Babylon happen in its tiny corners, not on the main stage of ideas, where the action can be overblown.
