Omar El Akkad. (2021). What Strange Paradise: A novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Omar El Akkad. 2021. What Strange Paradise: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021.

Omar El Akkad. What Strange Paradise: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021.

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1. • value: Political
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31. • value: best books 2021
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34. • value: what strange paradise by omar el akkad
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Akkad, Omar El
   • bioText: OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada's National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.
   • name: Omar El Akkad

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title

What Strange Paradise

fullDescription

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the widely acclaimed, bestselling author of American War—a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving novel that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child.
"Told from the point of view of two children, on the ground and at sea, the story so astutely unpacks the us-versus-them dynamics of our divided world that it deserves to be an instant classic." —The New York Times Book Review
More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vänna. Vänna is a teenage girl, who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vänna and Amir are complete strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, Vänna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy.
 
In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir’s life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair—and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 1, 2021
     

     El Akkad follows up the sharply imagined second Civil War portrayed in American War with an investigation of the world refugee crisis. The only survivor of his ship's Mediterranean passage, a nine-year-old Syrian boy named Amir is rescued by a homeless girl native to the island where he has landed.

     Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 24, 2021
     Akkad (American War) delivers a stirring if straightforward account of a young boy’s flight from Syria during the country’s civil war. Amir Utu sets out for Egypt with his mother, uncle/stepfather Younis, and baby stepbrother. When Younis boards a ferryboat overloaded with migrants, Amir follows him and ends up on a disastrous journey across the Mediterranean, of which he is the sole survivor. The details of what went wrong emerge gradually: first, Amir flees from soldiers on an unnamed island’s beach. He is then found by disaffected 15-year-old Vänna Hermes, who helps him evade detention. Here, Akkad explores a world in which migrants routinely wash up dead on the beach and are viewed as an inconvenience for wealthy tourists. The chapters alternate between the “Before” and “After” of Amir’s arrival on the island, chronicling the characters and challenges Amir faces on the boat and on land, and depicting the injustice, intolerance, and violence that refugees face in a hostile global landscape. The result is a moving if somewhat predictable story of survival and the need for compassion and camaraderie across languages, cultures, religions, and borders. While readers may find themselves wishing for more complexity, there is plenty of moral clarity. Agent: Anne McDermid, CookeMcDermid.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 1, 2021
     A migrant boy finds an unexpected ally in his accidental voyage across the sea. In recent years, images of discarded life jackets piling up on the shores of Greek islands have shocked the world, as migrants from the Middle East pursue uncertain futures in Europe or elsewhere in the fabled "West." In this timely, captivating novel, El Akkad dramatizes the story of one such traveler: Amir Utu, a 9-year-old boy who unwittingly undertakes the turbulent journey. After accidentally boarding a repurposed fishing boat heading north from Alexandria, Amir must contend with punishing seas, unpredictable weather, exhausting hunger, and an eventual storm that leads to the overcrowded ship's capsizing. In chapters that alternate between Amir's harrowing, multiday voyage and his fortunate encounter with V�nna, a teenage islander, upon washing ashore, El Akkad pieces together the strands of Amir's story, past and present, as they lead up to and diverge from that fateful moment at sea. El Akkad's compelling, poetic prose captures the precarity and desperation of people pushed to the brink, and the wide-ranging dialogue levels frequently trenchant critiques (Americans are "comfortable with violence, not sex. Sometimes they just get the two confused") even as it produces a few admittedly didactic monologues (a smuggler lectures the migrants: "You are the temporary object of their fraudulent outrage"). This is an equally incisive, if more conventional, novel than the author's debut, American War (2017). A compassionate snapshot of one Syrian refugee's struggle to plot a course for home.

     COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     January 7, 2022
     

     Career journalist El Akkad burst onto the literary scene with 2017's American War, a work of near-future political dystopia told from the vantage of a second American civil war. This follow-up mines its material from a more immediate international bent, tracing the before and after, in bifurcated structure, of a Mediterranean migrant crossing from the perspective of a young Middle Eastern boy, Amir. In most ways, this second effort is a better fit for the author. His reportage background--so clinically used in his first effort--is more affectingly applied to the present-day ethnography here, creating a twofold tension-filled narrative of a boy's dangerous sea crossing and his subsequent ally-aided flight toward "freedom." At the novel's best, El Akkad uses this charged setup to interrogate Western-exceptionalist notions of globalist philosophy: At one point, a character casually announces, "The two kinds of people in this world aren't good and bad--they're engine and fuel." This intellectual potency doesn't always abide, as the author's would-be exploration of a Middle East diaspora regrettably falls prey to more rote character arcs, the good and bad guys all too easily explicated. VERDICT If El Akkad's vision isn't entirely fleshed out, this novel still marks a step forward, with his characters at least realized on a full emotional spectrum even if they remain largely prescribed archetypes.--Luke Gorham

     Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from June 1, 2021
     Eight-year-old Amir Utu has recently moved to Egypt from war-torn Syria, after his family sold everything to gain passage. But when Amir's uncle mysteriously boards a ramshackle boat in the dark of night, the boy follows. He's bound for the Greek island of Kos, the only one in his boat who will survive the trip. And it's hardly paradise once he lands. A retired colonel, bent on chasing down refugees, sets his sights on poor Amir. Fortunately, the boy finds an ally in teen V�nna Hermes. Through another kind soul on the island, the kids now have a new mission: keep Amir safe for two days until he can get on a ferry to the mainland. El Akkad, author of the international best-seller, American War (2017), expertly contrasts the well-paced story of Amir's predicament with the ill-fated voyage that brought him to Greece. The ragtag bunch of strangers on the boat forms an incredibly well-drawn portrait of humanity as everyone bonds together initially, even with dollops of humor thrown in, but "somewhere along the journey they'd passed the point where human goodness gave way to the calculus of survival." A suspenseful and heartbreaking painting of the refugee crisis as experienced by two children caught in the crosshairs.

     COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the widely acclaimed, bestselling author of American War—a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving novel that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child.
"Told from the point of view of two children, on the ground and at sea, the story so astutely unpacks the us-versus-them dynamics of our divided world that it deserves to be an instant classic." —The New York Times Book Review
More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vänna. Vänna is a teenage girl, who, despite...

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