Tamirat has created fascinating and tragic characters ... It’s often funny, with barbed, machine-gun dialogue worthy of Aaron Sorkin, but there’s a twist at the end. It happens so suddenly that you’ll miss it if you skip a few lines, but it plunges the tale into darkness. Everything has failed for the narrator: the love of her parents, their hopes for life in America, her friendship with Ayale, Ayale’s own screwy dreams and the island’s utopian vision. Everything has failed, that is, but the narrator. Because she’s the one who’s lived to tell the tale.
Tamirat has an excellent eye for the minor detail that becomes important in retrospect ... Tamirat is equally gifted at a strain of absurdism that’s delightfully reminiscent of both Kafka and Jonathan Lethem ... Tamirat is an extremely talented writer. Her prose is sharp, incisive and often very funny. There are dazzling passages. But as a novel, The Parking Lot Attendant suffers from an oddly under-edited quality. There are distracting incongruities throughout, sentences that work perfectly well on their own but serve to undermine aspects of character development or plot, and thus the overall cohesion of the novel ... Given the author’s obvious talent and the frequent brilliance of her prose, it’s frustrating to contemplate how much sharper this novel might have been with another round or two of editing. A compensation for readers is that Tamirat is at the beginning of her career, and there’s every reason to expect a truly dazzling body of work.
Learned, charismatic, secretive and magnetic, he begins to mentor the impressionable narrator, and before long he’s paying her to deliver mysterious packages throughout the city ... It’s a jarring and curiously incomplete U-turn into political intrigue, and one feels that a more confident novel would have cut out the thriller formulations. Ms. Tamirat has reason to be confident. When her novel is good, it’s very good indeed.
Tamirat feels free to cut across boundaries, blending surreal suspense with psychological realism. Her narrator’s acerbic yet candid voice is disarming; it will keep you steady company even as her novel subverts expectations again and again ... an inspired meld of the teenager-meets-mentor plot and a noir-ish mystery ... The novel takes on the dimensions of a thriller in its action-packed final quarter, and Tamirat teeters between earned climax and excessive drama.
Tamirat’s razor-sharp prose fashions a magnificently dimensional and emotionally resonant narrator, herself a storyteller who frames her own tale with beguiling skill. This debut is remarkable in every way.
Tamirat's debut novel has problems. It continually flies off into tiny tangents that are left hanging like fraying silk. It's often hard to tell who's speaking in the snappy dialogues that make up most of the book. And the plot is so confusing that even at book's end, when a dramatic chase has you completely hooked, it's hard to say what is happening and why. And yet it's a captivating story, and we come to care deeply for the unnamed narrator ... The novel is both a coming-of-age story and a lament for an immigrant community that is not quite at home in old country or new. While this book would have benefited from a careful rewrite or two, it is nonetheless a worthwhile and spooky read.
...it’s a testament to Tamirat’s storytelling acumen and well-crafted characters that The Parking Lot Attendant works so well ... Tamirat wonderfully captures her narrator’s teenage capriciousness, particularly in her feelings for Ayale, which slew between idolatry, infatuation, anger and disgust. When answers eventually start to come, they often remain vague, which can be a bit frustrating. Part of the tension that could have existed as the story heats up is lost because we know the narrator’s immediate fate from the start: She’s on that island. Ultimately the resolution, much like this enjoyable debut, feels over all too fast.
Tamirat writes blind teenage devotion well, but what seems initially to be a story about a forbidden relationship becomes much more: Ayale’s empire is less a metaphor for his power in the Boston neighborhood and more an actual dream of domination on the world scene—a dream that the narrator features more prominently in than she could imagine ... Captivating for both its unusual detail and observant take on teenage trust. Curious and delightful.
Tamirat’s wonderful debut novel weaves growing pains, immigrant troubles, and moments of biting humor ... The unsettling conclusion serves as a perfect ending for this riveting coming-of-age story full of murky motives, deep emotion, and memorable characters.
