On Fragile Waves

Starred review from December 1, 2020

DEBUT Yu follows up her sf and fantasy short fiction, including the Hugo-, Locus-, and Nebula-nominated and Astounding Award-winning "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees," with an evocative and heart-lacerating debut novel. Firuzeh and her brother Nour flee war-torn Kabul with their parents, who tell them fairy tales to ease the journey through Pakistan and Indonesia to Nauru Island, their gateway to Australia. The journey is hard, their stay in Nauru's immigration detention camp harder, and even as the family makes it to Australia, they are not sure whether they will be allowed to stay. As she and Nour adjust to a life that may never be theirs, Firuzeh is helped along by some hardheaded advice from a drowned girl named Nasima, a magic realist touch that (with the interwoven fairy tales) serves to amplify a situation both harsh and unimaginable--can people really be made to suffer this way and for naught? While Yu's exactingly detailed story is told in the third person, the voices of the children predominate, which makes this wrenching portrait of the immigrant experience especially affecting. VERDICT Essential fiction to understand our world; Yu will draw in new fans while continuing to intrigue those who have read her for years.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2021
Stubborn, bold dreamer Firuzeh, her brother Nour, and their parents, their Atay and Abay, set off from Afghanistan on a long, difficult journey as refugees to find asylum in Australia by way of Pakistan, Indonesia, and Nauru. They face rocking waters, dirty camps, and spitting prejudice as they attempt to find a safe home amid vanishing friends, tenuous lifelines, and broken promises. Yu's debut is rooted in Firuzeh's fervent desire for stability and in her mother's rich emotional center. Yu occasionally dives into a peripheral character's perspective--the English tutor teaching Atay and Abay, a guard working at the refugee camp--giving a grounding vividness to the story of the Daizangi family's quest for home that is both vast and intensely intimate. Yu's writing is poetic, the lines of her dialogue strumming into one another, mirroring the way that Firuzeh's stories begin to blend reality and folklore--as Firuzeh crafts tales to make sense of her reality, and as the incomprehensible tragedies around her morph into imaginary friends that Firuzeh and Nour can't seem to shake. On Fragile Waves is a lyrical fabulist novel that will enchant readers of both literary fiction and fantasy.

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