![]() ![]() Yet even Beah’s fluid prose cannot save the first hundred pages from feeling oversaturated with information and names, which he gives to even the most insignificant characters. It’s a wise choice, in keeping with the overall tone of a story about adolescents held together by a cultivated consanguinity. Unlike many novels featuring large casts, Beah’s does not apportion its main characters into different chapters, instead interweaving their stories together in one, unified narrative. A keen-eyed writer, Beah employs expansive language to describe their conditions with an ecstatic flair: how, when the wind blows a newspaper into the wing of their home - which is to say, “the skeleton of a medium-size plane” shrouded by vines and palm trees - “it was possible to imagine that one of the propellers was spinning and the old airplane was going to start its missing engine and take off.” The characters who constitute the titular family - wandering youths having arrived at, or been brought to, the makeshift home one by one - undulate slowly into the reader’s awareness, the story gradually encircling and then continuing to cycle around all of them for the duration of the book. It’s set in an unnamed country, but there is something deeply African about this novel, Beah’s second, behind “Radiance of Tomorrow” and a best-selling war memoir, “A Long Way Gone.” Part of that strong sense of place comes from its resemblances to Uwem Akpan’s story collection “Say You’re One of Them,” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s wonderful novel, “We Need New Names.” Beah is concerned with lives upended by conflict and strife, and with people living in what has sadly become the textbook example of 20th-century African reality. The page-long hypothetical draws the reader into the world of a fictional African town and serves as a doorway onto the “little family” of the novel: a group of five dispossessed kids who have become separated from their homes and now live together in an abandoned airplane they’ve appropriated as their palatial “King’s property.” “Little Family” begins with an intriguing prologue addressed directly to the reader, who will be forced to return to it again and again over the course of the book. ![]()
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