Don't Tell Me You're Afraid

June 13, 2016
In this novel based on real events, 21-year-old Olympic runner Samia Yusuf Omar set off to reach freedom in Italy via the Mediterranean Sea in 2012. It is the final leg of a nearly year-and-a-half-long journey from her home in the war-torn city of Mogadishu, the last five months of which she spent at the mercy of human traffickers. In Catozzella’s novel, Samia hopes she could make it to her older sister’s home in Helsinki with enough time to train and qualify for the 2012 London Olympics and “lead Somali women to liberation from the bondage in which men have placed them.” The novel begins in 1999, when Samia is eight years old, and the simply drawn yet moving text explores each milestone in the aspiring runner’s life, from her childhood friendship with Ali, whose family is from a rival clan, to her father’s murder by a member of the militant Islamist group al-Shabaab, to Samia’s thrilling voyage to China to compete in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The most intense and hard-to-stomach sections cover her grueling experiences as a tahrib, or exiled refuge, stranded first in Addis Ababa, then in villages and cities throughout Sudan and Libya, including the Sahara desert, before landing in Tripoli. Translated from Catozzella’s Italian, the book serves as a sobering reminder of the life-threatening challenges many modern migrants face in the pursuit of freedom.

In this timely novel, narrator Adjoa Andoh brings out the energy of a young African woman's tumultuous life. Samia Omar has wanted to run competitively ever since she was a child. She trains any way she can in war-torn Somalia in hopes of qualifying for the London Olympics in 2012. Andoh's narration has a subdued quality to it, hinting at Samia's tragic end. The story takes listeners through the ups and downs of life as a teenager growing up in a country gripped by civil war. At times, Andoh's delivery can be overly dramatic, and her presentation of Somali-inflected English can be heavy on the ear. But listeners will overlook these small shortcomings to embrace the novel's contemporary themes of identity, migration, and grit. M.R. � AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine