The Parking Lot Attendant

Starred review from November 6, 2017
Tamirat’s wonderful debut novel weaves growing pains, immigrant troubles, and moments of biting humor. When the story opens, the unnamed 15-year-old narrator and her father are living on an island run by a shadowy collective. She then flashes back to her life in Boston with her father, an Ethiopian immigrant, and the story of how they ended up on the island. An overheard Amharic conversation draws her to much older Ayale, a fellow Ethiopian and parking lot attendant. Attracted to his challenging personality and intrigued by the sway he has over a wide range of devoted followers, the narrator becomes deeply attached to Ayale. Tension fills Tamirat’s story: quotidian teenage frustrations are combined with the real danger of the narrator’s unquestioning trust in Ayale’s hasty explanations for his package delivery scheme. As questions pile up and strangers start lurking near the narrator’s home, the danger rises and Ayale reveals his intentions. One of the debut’s highlights is the narrator: she is both able to hold her own against Ayale in intellectual debates and desperate to gain his acceptance and love; like many teenagers, she is at once world-weary, naive, outspoken, and vulnerable. The unsettling conclusion serves as a perfect ending for this riveting coming-of-age story full of murky motives, deep emotion, and memorable characters.

February 1, 2018

On an island only referenced as B__, a young, unnamed narrator joins her father at a presumably utopian commune--just a few of the mystifying elements in a debut novel that will perplex and even exasperate some readers. The narrator does launch a tale about what led her to the island from her home in Boston, but the connections between her current predicament and her interactions with Ayale, the parking lot attendant and unofficial leader of Boston's Ethiopian community, are left largely unresolved. As her relationship with Ayale deepens, she suspects that many of his activities are illicit, though what these activities may be is not entirely clear despite perhaps too subtle hints of homicide, terrorism, and organized crime. What is clear here is that this coming-of-age story falters, except in Tamirat's strong development of the narrator's voice and the charismatic characterization of Ayale. VERDICT While it's reasonable to assume that the gullibility of the adolescent narrator shapes the plot's haziness, by the novel's end Tamirat has simply not provided enough of a story upon which to hang her fairly well-developed characters.--Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2018
An Ethiopian-American teenager falls under the spell of a mysterious man from her community who runs a small empire out of his parking lot.Tamirat's debut novel stutters a bit at the beginning, wanting to remain vague; its unnamed narrator, a teenage girl from Boston, is with her Ethiopian immigrant father on a subtropical island referred to only as "B----." It's unclear why they are there or why there is so much conflict between them. But in the second chapter, as the narrator begins to describe their previous life in Boston and a shrewd, shadowy trickster named Ayale, the novel gains a steadier footing as well as a sense of humor and a keen view of teenage preoccupations. Ayale, a fellow Ethiopian who runs the parking lot and who allows the girl to hang around after school, bends her infatuation to his nefarious business practices. He begins to send her on errands and ingratiate himself with her. "I feel as though I'm carrying Ayale with me at all times," she says as her idolatry blooms, "although for whom and for what reason escapes me. The weight is often unbearable, but I am terrified of what would happen if I were to let go completely." Tamirat walks a fine and observant line--the relationship between the narrator and Ayale isn't sexual, but it has the hallmarks of risky teenage admiration. The narrator's father is rightly concerned about the "near-pathological ways in which Ayale bound people to him, trapping them in a web of debt from which they could never escape. This, according to him, was Ayale's version of creating love." 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. In the end, the narrator says "none of us got what we wanted"--except, maybe, the reader.Captivating for both its unusual detail and observant take on teenage trust. Curious and delightful.

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Starred review from February 1, 2018
The unnamed, 16-year-old narrator of Tamirat's mysterious and steadily exciting first novel begins her story on the island of Bbefore backtracking to explain how she and her father ended up there. The only child of her Ethiopian immigrant parents, she had been living with her father, a stoic and reliable repairman, in Boston. Two years earlier, she met fellow Ethiopian Ayale, a magnetic, much-older parking-lot attendant, and her first encounter with the unofficial intelligence network that includes all Ethiopians in any given locale. She hasn't fully forgiven her father for the unexplained absence he took during her first few years, despite the quiet, if boring, stability of their life together ever since, while Ayale both holds up a mirror for her emerging brilliance and seems to promise an ever-deepening connection. When she's the last to understand that her work delivering wrapped parcels around Boston, treated nonchalantly yet paid for generously by Ayale, is not the simple service to the Ethiopian community that Ayale first described, it becomes clear that her safety is not guaranteed. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)