The Other Americans - BoundCovers

No cover — Laila Lalami: The Other Americans (Paperback, 2019, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc)

Paperback, 301 pages

English language

Published Feb. 20, 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

ISBN:: 978-1-5266-0669-3

(2 reviews)

There wasn't anything I could do. All I saw was a man falling to the ground.

Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, a former classmate of Nora's and now a veteran of the Iraq war; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and Driss himself.

As the characters – deeply divided by race, religion and class – tell their …

There wasn't anything I could do. All I saw was a man falling to the ground.

Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, a former classmate of Nora's and now a veteran of the Iraq war; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and Driss himself.

As the characters – deeply divided by race, religion and class – tell their stories in The Other Americans, Driss's family is forced to confront its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies and love, in all its messy and unpredictable forms, is born.

6 editions

Stephanie Jane reviewed The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

Not as compelling as I had hoped

4 stars

The Other Americans is an interesting portrayal of the intersection of a number of lives, brought together as the result of a seemingly random hit and run accident. Through the novel we read numerous first person chapters from a large cast of characters, getting to know their thoughts and experiences from both before and after the man was killed. I liked the idea of the multiple viewpoints, but would have preferred that there be fewer of them because not all the characters were strongly defined so I sometimes forgot whose words I was reading.

The novel moves across genres so at the beginning it felt like it might become a whodunnit, then it was more of a slice-of-life family drama, then we swooped into a romance. I thought these changes worked well and allowed Lalami to explore a wider variety of social issues than perhaps a more traditionally genred novel …

The Other Americans is an interesting portrayal of the intersection of a number of lives, brought together as the result of a seemingly random hit and run accident. Through the novel we read numerous first person chapters from a large cast of characters, getting to know their thoughts and experiences from both before and after the man was killed. I liked the idea of the multiple viewpoints, but would have preferred that there be fewer of them because not all the characters were strongly defined so I sometimes forgot whose words I was reading.

The novel moves across genres so at the beginning it felt like it might become a whodunnit, then it was more of a slice-of-life family drama, then we swooped into a romance. I thought these changes worked well and allowed Lalami to explore a wider variety of social issues than perhaps a more traditionally genred novel might have done. Not everything is given the attention that perhaps I would have liked though. For example, near the beginning, we learn that Nora has synaesthesia and I thought it would be be interesting to gain a greater understanding of this condition through the novel. However it isn't mentioned again so that was a dead end. Like with the number of narrators, I felt that greater concentration on fewer avenues might have made for a more compelling read. I did enjoy The Other Americans, but wasn't as gripped by it as I had hoped.

[email protected] reviewed The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

A good read about how people are complicated

4 stars

This book was compelling to read not because of any sense of mystery, of which there is some, but because I wanted to learn more about what the characters were thinking.

The author chose to have the chapters cycle through the perspective of different characters surrounding the main character, Nora. It's a story of grief, how the grief of one person spills onto the other, and how people may have done and said one thing but actually thought or felt another way.

It was a good reminder that we are all stumbling through the world trying to make the best out of the mistakes we have made.

I would recommend to anyone who enjoys seeing things from another person's perspective, but if you are looking for a straight up mystery novel, like the synopsis implies, you will be disappointed.

Subjects

Literary fiction