Jacaranda by Rwandan-French novelist and hip-hop artist Gaël Faye (Small Country) is an award-winning exploration of family, history, and one young man's place in it all. At first, for 12-year-old Milan, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda is just images on the news brought to him in France, where he lives with his Rwandan mother and French father. But it becomes real when a wounded relative arrives. Milan's mother tells him little about Claude--just that he's her nephew and in France for medical treatment.
Milan adopts Claude as a brother until, without warning, Claude is gone. Milan's mother avoids his questions, saying only that relatives they'd presumed dead have resurfaced and are taking the other boy in. It's the first domino to fall in an emotive narrative that leads Milan to Rwanda, where he excavates the painful legacy of family and country.
Jacaranda is filled with complex and dynamic characters, many whom Milan meets in Rwanda. Stella was born after the violence but is still impacted by its repercussions. Milan helps her transcribe and share her great-grandmother's life story. Sartre is a music-obsessed young man caring for orphaned and displaced children in a dilapidated compound. Sartre's relationship with Claude becomes more tangled when they uncover revelations about Sartre's past. As Milan navigates relationships with these characters, he grows from a child into an adult. His worldview broadens and complicates his sense of identity in profound ways.
Translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone, Jacaranda is a moving personal history set in a broader landscape of violence and trauma. --Carol Caley, writer