In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills

March 15, 2018

Lillian Carlson was 17 when an idealistic photographer captured the zeitgeist of a generation in her face as she stood in Ebenezer Baptist Church, enthralled by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s call to service. Emboldened by the civil rights movement, Lillian and photographer Henry Shepherd dared a yearlong interracial affair that ended in one violent moment. Henry ran home to Florida, where he married and fathered Rachel. Torn between two worlds, Henry eventually left his family for Rwanda and the farm in the Virunga hills where Lillian had created an orphanage. But in 1994, their idyll was destroyed by the horrific Hutu uprising against the Tutsis. Years later, Lillian's adopted daughter Nadine returns to testify against her neighbors at a truth and reconciliation tribunal, and Rachel, an adult grieving for her unborn baby girl, travels to the farm seeking the father who abandoned her. Linked by the absent Henry, these resilient women embody the grace of a nation moving forward after unspeakable loss. VERDICT Journalist Haupt spent time in Rwanda researching the nature of grief and forgiveness. In this intensely beautiful debut, she shows that it's indeed the women who hold up half the sky.--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 26, 2018
A woman’s pursuit of the truth about what happened to her father leads her to post-genocide Rwanda in Haupt’s ambitious debut. Rachel Shepherd’s search for her estranged father, photographer Henry Shepherd, leads her to an orphanage in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda in the year 2000. There she meets and is welcomed by Lillian Carlson, an African-American woman from Atlanta who runs an orphanage that she built with Henry after he left his family in New York. Lillian welcomes Rachel but says no one has heard from Henry in two years. Rachel stays on in the hopes of learning more. She meets Nadine, a young Tutsi woman who barely survived the 1994 massacres; Tucker, a Californian doctor; and many others who live with memories Rachel cannot even fathom. Their stories and the photos Henry left behind help her to understand what it really means to have strength of character and to love. Unfortunately, Nadine is the only major character who is Rwandan; the rest are American, leaving the reader disconnected from the people whose plight constitutes one of the major themes of the book. But the Rwanda described in the text is beautiful, a place where “pink winged geese glide among over-sized purple lilies that bow like ladies in waiting,” and, like the main narrative, it is alive with people working to come together and heal. Even though it’s ostensibly about the Rwandan genocide, Haupt’s story is one of humanity and hope.