This is the story of a family on the eve of the Ethiopian revolution that would topple the centuries old monarchy. Hailu is a famous doctor, who is helpless before his wife's congenital heart failure. His older son, Yonas, is in his thirties and a professor of history, religious, with a wife and young daughter. The younger son, Dawit, is a college student, idealistic and intent on being part of the change happening around him, rebelling against his father's attempts to protect him. What happens to them during the years 1974-77 is heartbreaking and absorbing and a beautiful look at family relationships during a tumultuous period of political upheaval.

Maaza Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa and now lives in the United States. She writes with a maturity that belies this is her first novel. The language is such that I reread passages just to enjoy the language. It is a difficult novel to read, however, because of the atrocities that happened in those years. Although the setting is historical, and I know nothing about Ethiopian history, I had no trouble following the plot because this is not a novel about the macro, but the micro, a family. That said, I think the novel is well-researched, given the bibliography at the end. I very much look forward to reading her later novel, The Shadow King. ( )

A good overview of history that I knew nothing about, through characters that I felt very concerned about since obviously nothing good was going to happen to anyone. The book gets a little explain-y at times, and I found it hard to pick up, but perhaps that's because it was so heavy. As living under the Derg probably was. The history teacher in me is glad that I read it, the rest of me is going to go read some witty graphic novels or something else light now. ( )

This is a bit of a tough read at times, with a great many gruesome torture scenes, but ultimately I found it compelling. It follows a particular well-to-do family in Ethiopia during the "revolution" and terror of the 1970s, along with some of their acquaintances – all in all it amounts to a huge and unwieldy cast. Unfortunately this means that most of the characters seem rather two-dimensional, but the sheer breadth of the work distracted me from that while reading.

This novel's main strength is the unflinching detail in describing the horror of dictatorship. It's really unfortunate that within the text such dictatorship is equated with "communism", as if intense repression was in any way the same thing as the democratic control of society by the working class, but y'know, Stalinism (and McCarthyism too, I suppose) should really take the blame for that. The other problem with the novel is that there are some rather unbelievable twists in the plot (mostly where the Colonel apparently had his own daughter arrested for handing out pamphlets, and she somehow without his authorisation got brutally tortured? how exactly was that supposed to have worked?!), as well as some turns that just didn't seem to come from anywhere. But nonetheless, I thought the novel evoked imagery very well – images of Ethiopia, of totalitarian regimes, etc.

I'd really feel more comfortable giving this three and a half; four seems too generous but three too harsh, considering that despite all the flaws I mentioned above I still found this gripping. I guess I would recommend this more as dystopian fiction than historical, and if you're coming at it from that interest, you'll probably enjoy it more. ( )

This is a well-written and gripping book if read as historical FICTION; it's a well-written and frightening book when read as HISTORICAL fiction. It is amazing how quickly the machinery of fascism and totalitarianism can get set up by people ostensibly working in the interest of the "people". Africa usually shakes free of the shackles of colonial powers only to fall prey to dictators backed by those powers. But Ethiopia was a sovereign nation ruled by an emperor whose lineage extended back into antiquity, so one could hope for so much more. Alas, like many kings and emperors, his neglect of the common people while living a life of luxury led to the coup that the cold war powers were only to glad to help make even more rapacious and violent.
Against this backdrop we get the gripping story of a family and country torn apart by the brutality of the Derg. Mengiste does a brilliant job of showing the different paths even members of the same family can take through a crisis of this magnitude and how there are many different types of courage and of resistance. When I read books like this, I always wonder, what would I do? How would that change based on when in my life it occurred? How did something like this happen without my knowledge? I was 13 when the Derg took power in the '70s. As an American, I remember Vietnam from that era, of course. I remember the Iranian Revolution. I remember Idi Amin and Apartheid. But why do I have this blank spot in my knowledge? Is it because no Americans or American interests were threatened? No cute elephants killed? Glad to fill in this missing knowledge even though it is sobering and gruesome to do so, and makes me grieve even more for Africa. I'll continue to fill in the holes of my knowledge of Africa as I find literature from each country and culture. I would heartily recommend Megiste for Ethiopia.

I wish I could give this another half star.

The first third was a mess but the book straightens itself out and streamlines into something quite powerful. One family in 1970s Ethiopia, the father is a doctor and the two adult children find themselves at opposite sides of a complex political situation. When the father is brought to jail after working on a tortured prisoner at his hospital, the family has to decide how they are going to handle his arrest and the crumbling, war torn society around them.
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