How to Read the air

Locations
Call Number: Fiction, Adult Book / Fiction / General / Mengestu, Dinaw
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Mengestu, Dinaw	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas, the son of Ethiopian immigrants, sets out to retrace his mother and father's trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to his life in the America of today.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Absolutely beautiful. submitted by prlhw on June 18, 2012, 7:09pm This novel is told between two points of views: Jonas, the 30-something-year-old narrator and a 3rd person retelling of his parents' roadtrip they took before he was even born. Jonas fills in the details of their trip most elegantly and at the same time, cleverly avoids the "know it all" attitude that many authors accidently embody when retelling an event that they were never even alive to witness. Instead, Jonas' words gracefully illustrate stories full of sorrow and regret pinned up onto scenic backdrops of what-once-was. The novel carefully dissects how we constructs our identities, pasts, and futures, and most importantly, why and how we "fill those in" with lies and "what could've beens".