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923 reviews for:
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After
Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil
4.25 AVERAGE
923 reviews for:
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After
Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil
4.25 AVERAGE
She is a gifted, powerful writer. Her story is a hard one to read, but one I think anyone who reads it is better for having read it. Highly recommend.
This story was absolutely heartbreaking and beautiful all at the same time. I truly don't have the right words to say in reviewing this book other than YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED TO READ THIS! if it wasn't for Book Of The Month, I'm not sure when I would have gotten the chance to read this but now I did before it's on the shelves!
Clemantine is such a powerful person, she took me to a place in my heart that I haven't been to in such a long time and to tell her story was so brave and courageous. I have so much love her for, so much pain for her and can only hope that she knows and understands how captivating this story is to so many readers. This story has given me knowledge in understanding things that I hold close to my heart but rarely remind myself of it. To know that it's okay and you are strong, you are powerful and you can do whatever you want in this world and to be your own hero. I thank her for giving me this story to read and opening my heart a little more to what is around me and who I have near me.
I can only say so much about this book until I just tell you everything so I highly encourage you to pick this up on April 24th and go in this story with a big heart and just know that it will be hard at times giving this book is non fiction and you're following a young girl who goes through very raw events that you couldn't imagine. Please read this story, I promise you that you will recommend it to your neighbors right after.
Clemantine is such a powerful person, she took me to a place in my heart that I haven't been to in such a long time and to tell her story was so brave and courageous. I have so much love her for, so much pain for her and can only hope that she knows and understands how captivating this story is to so many readers. This story has given me knowledge in understanding things that I hold close to my heart but rarely remind myself of it. To know that it's okay and you are strong, you are powerful and you can do whatever you want in this world and to be your own hero. I thank her for giving me this story to read and opening my heart a little more to what is around me and who I have near me.
I can only say so much about this book until I just tell you everything so I highly encourage you to pick this up on April 24th and go in this story with a big heart and just know that it will be hard at times giving this book is non fiction and you're following a young girl who goes through very raw events that you couldn't imagine. Please read this story, I promise you that you will recommend it to your neighbors right after.
This is a very powerful and heartbreaking story of trauma and resilience. I settled for three stars because the non-linear format of the memoir really didn’t work for me.
Clemantine tells her story of her life in Rwanda during the war and afterwards and how the genocide affected her life. We see the war and life as a refugee through her eyes as a 6 to 12 year old girl. It is raw and sad and touching. We also see her life in the US as her resourceful older sister, Claire was able to apply for them to come to the US and their life here, their appearance on the Oprah show, and their being reunited with the rest of their family who survived the war. At the beginning of the war, Clemantine, who was 6 years old, and her older sister, Claire, who was fifteen, were sent to a relative's house for safety, however, they had to flee and spent the next six years as refugees. I highly recommend the book.
Beginning: intense introduction, you have my attention
Middle: loss of interest, at times painfully slow, feelings of dislike towards Clemantine beginning to emerge (I admire her bravery and struggle but there is something about her I can’t quite put my finger on that is making me dislike her)
Ending: finally, I can move on to my second pick I selected for BOTMC.
Middle: loss of interest, at times painfully slow, feelings of dislike towards Clemantine beginning to emerge (I admire her bravery and struggle but there is something about her I can’t quite put my finger on that is making me dislike her)
Ending: finally, I can move on to my second pick I selected for BOTMC.
Clemantine Wamariya’s memoir didn’t grab me right away. The language seemed too simple, the opening right where you would expect—center stage with Oprah. But she invites the reader in gradually, expertly. This is a story she has been telling most of her life, and she knows the power it holds. At the heart of her account of genocide and refugees is the thorny question of memory. How do we remember trauma when trauma itself scatters our memories and sets time in disarray? If healing comes through the stories we tell, how can we heal in the aftermath of the unspeakable? Wamariya is many things: a genocide survivor, a refugee, a Yale graduate. But above all, she is an aunt, a sister, a daughter. Outraged by what the world made her live through, Wamariya also writes of the heartbreaking loneliness as the only one in her family who can bear to tell this story. Her memoir is courageous because it reveals a woman in the process of healing, incomplete and questioning and indomitable. This is not a perfect book, but that’s perhaps the point. There is no literary form that can hold the chaos and horror of such mass suffering. It is a good book, an important book, and, at this historical moment, maybe even a necessary book.
The word genocide is clinical, overly general, bloodless and dehumanising. "Oh, its like that holocaust?" people would say to me - say to me still.
To this day I do not know how to respond and be polite.
No, I want to scream, it's not like the Holocaust. Or the killing fields in Cambodia. Or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. There's no catchall term that proves you understand.
There's no label to peel and stick that absolves you, shows you've done your duty, you've completed the moral project of remembering.
This - Rwanda, my life - is different, specific, personal tragedy, just as each of those horrors was a different, specific, personal tragedy and inside all those tidily tabled boxes are 6 million, or 1.7 million or 100,000 or 100 billion lives destroyed.
You cannot line up the atrocities like a matching set.
You cannot bear witness with a single word.
This book is a must read, in my option.
It tells you a part of history in such a honest and real way, takes you to the nice days before the bad days started, takes you through the horrible life of having to leave everything -your family, home and everything that gives you comfort- behind in seconds, and leaving you with the only human instinct: Survival.
This book takes you on a journey.
Its not necessarily a good one, but an important one none the less.
Its not a good one because its so honest.
It really talks about the good, the bad and everything in between that humanity has to offer.
It shows us that even those that try to help can sometimes to a lot of harm.
Be it with words or actions or expectations.
No matter how much good intention they have or how well they are meaning it, this book really shows us that if you haven't lived it, you don't understand.
And thats not a bad thing!
Everyones story is unique (which the book also clearly stats and its so TRUE! and i loved that it was so focused on saying "this is my story, this is just one story of what happened in Rwanda, not THE story!") and while some people might better understand what others go through or survived through... nobody really understand if you where there.
And even if you where there, lived through the same, its still your own unique story.
In the book itself Clemantine talks about her experience and later on mentions that her sister always tells the same story differently. So even thought both of them lived through the same days, through the same events, they remember it completely differently.
And that i just how life is.
Which might sound depressing, but i think that is what makes us all so unique and that is what we all have to remember.
Everyone has a story to tell, and especially those that survived through horrendous humanity caused tragedies have to tell theirs, to remind everyone what is at stake, what could be happening, what has happened and that we all have to work together to not let it happen again or let it continue.
READ THIS BOOK.
And be swapped away into a horrendous, tragic, beautiful life story that makes you think, makes you connect and understand while also starting to question things.
READ IT and LEARN!
*Thanks to Netgalley, the publishers and the author for providing me with a free e-copy of this book in exchange for a free and honest review!*
I learned some things. I felt some things. The story got a little rushed towards the end but I'm sure that's because Clemamtine is still alive and trying to figure her life out. it's only been 24 years since the Rwandan genocide.
This is easily one of the most valuable memoirs of our time. Brutal, relevant, vexing, refreshing--Clemantine (cleman-TEEN) Wamariya gives us all of herself, her Rwandan, refugee, American self, in a neat package with brilliant intonation and outright honesty.
Recommend for everyone to read.
Recommend for everyone to read.
An incredible story, told very honestly and self-critically. I expected it to be much heavier, but it's written in a readable, gripping fashion. A great telling of how something so awful can have lasting effects, even when it's seemingly "over".