RaveThe Los Angeles Times...the novel shows us three characters bonding over their joint but different memories of another home, another sense of self, lost in the Africa they cannot return to ... The book’s molten core belongs to Sepha and his witty though elegiac voice. Seldom has a character emerged in a recent novel who is so compellingly dark but honest, hopeful but dismal, and able to turn his chronicle into a truly American tapestry: racially fraught, culturally limited, haunted by a dream of itself that has driven writers like Twain and others to make and remake it ... Mengestu constantly parallels Ethiopia’s failed revolution with life in the U.S., and readers see in what happens in Logan Circle some proof that the alternative that America offers is failing and failing fast -- what kind of paradise evicts its occupants on behalf of gentrification? ... The most haunting moments in the novel occur when the narrative tries to balance small, quiet moments of shame with those of true tenderness.
