Careful to be nuanced and ethically complex, to avoid the well-worn tropes of victimhood and challenge readers’ perceptions of refugees. With his characters, Fishman achieves these goals ... But his unoriginal storytelling undermines the novel’s moral complication. Fishman too often hews to common narrative beats ... He also foreshadows too heavily ... Aggressively noticeable prose is often an attempt to distract readers from an issue elsewhere in the text, which may be the case here. But the novel’s central problem stems from a deliberate constraint: Fishman’s choice not to tell readers who his characters are ... All of this is highly frustrating, especially from a writer as talented as Fishman. His intentions in The Unwanted are plainly good; they are, perhaps, the novel’s best quality. In fiction, that’s far from enough.
Fishman effectively captures the fear, malaise, and desperation that comes with others’ control of our movements, but it’s particularity a drag on the storytelling. An informed, earnest, and at times labored tale of escape.
