...[an] immersive, exhilarating memoir ...This memoir adds an essential voice to the genre of migrant literature, challenging false popular narratives that migration is optional, permanent and always results in a better life ... The Dragons, the Giant, the Women also resists the pervasive, narrow-minded, gratuitously violent stereotypes of Africa that haunt Tutu during her school years in the West ... Those starving right now for physical contact with loved ones outside their immediate homes will find special resonance in Tutu’s parents’ eventual reunion in Sierra Leone ... Likewise, separations in this book are written with equal intimacy, and heartbreak ... The book, jumping confidently across decades and continents and even narrative perspectives, closes with a section of such masterful danger and suspense that the reader is afraid for Moore’s life, although we know the ending...
... a book of gripping realism ... This [middle] section is the shortest in the book, and feels a bit truncated. But it is followed by the gripping final section in Mam’s voice, narrating her harrowing journey to save her family. This is a memoir of redemption and loss, and of making peace with unresolved pasts. It functions both as a social history of a bloody conflict that is still largely misunderstood (or, worse, ignored) here in the West, and as a universal story of humankind’s ability to survive even the most brutal conflicts. As Moore writes movingly, 'There are many stories of war to tell. You will hear them all. But remember among those who were lost, some made it through. Among the dragons there will always be heroes. Even there. Even then.'
In the final pages, Moore brings 5-year-old Tutu back to narrate the reunion with Mam. Told in spare, childlike prose, the scene is vivid and heart-shattering. (Full disclosure: When I read that section aloud to my husband, we both cried.) Moore’s gorgeously rendered memoir is an exhortation not to surrender to tragedy fatigue. There are so many stories of war and forced migration that they may, at a distance, blur into sameness. But zoom in and those abstractions sharpen into singular stories, each one a complicated blend of loss and salvation, tragedy and triumph, bitterness and wisdom.
I recommend reading the dialogue aloud to approximate the effect of the lyrical rhythms of speech. As the days and weeks of escape drag on, Moore employs an effective technique for conveying the monotony of boredom—and terror—with epic run-on sentences, stretching for pages ... The sense of immediacy, even after so many years, is visceral. In the last quarter of the book, Mam’s first-person narrative relates the other side of this story, a thrilling surprise, a tale of courage, daring, and serendipity.
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 ... 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.
In this beautiful memoir of dislocation, a young girl flees war-torn Liberia with her family to America ... 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.
A lyrical reckoning with the aftermath of civil war ... 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.
