MIHRET Sibhat’s debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though He were mad at somebody. The resulting flood carries detritus to the Small River, which passes things along to the Medium River, which hands the lot off to the Big River, and before we know it we, too, are swept away, caught in the force of that water, in the force of those sentences, which take us right to Selam Asmelash, the irresistible and unforgettable heart of the story—a not-quite-a-child narrator busy making her way into the world.
“I am the little terrorist who managed to fuck with an entire town’s head before I was evensomehow manages—relentlessly, like that flood—to pose big questions about politics, power, and faith. Mihret Sibhat has written a novel that seamlessly and audaciously teaches us to play by its rules and to read along at its merciless, fluid velocity. It’s a book that will make you feel like you must keep up with it and that there’s nothing you’d rather do.
