...[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.
