An Afghan family escape Kabul, through Pakistan, then on an overloaded boat to Nauru, the holding island for refugees to Australia. Told from a preteen girl, she experiences such hardship often unknowing how much worse it could be. So many thing were special about this book: 1) the plight of refugees everywhere, 2) told from the perspective of a child, 3) revealing Australia faces a refugee crisis like the rest of the world and handling it poorly like the rest of the world. This is an extremely difficult book to read—the family is pummeled with everything that can go wrong. When you just want them to survive. And I learned how Nauru was once one of the richest countries per capita in the world until it was stripped of its natural resources, only to become a “holding pen” for the “undesirable” immigrants. Fortunately it’s a short read. But an important one. ( )

Mostly told from the viewpoint of pre-teen Firuzeh, we follow her Afghan family through their halting escape to the island refugee prison maintained by Australia. The long detention is followed by a difficult time in Melbourne where all the bitterness of their limited life finally surfaces for her parents. This can't be close to the worst that refugees from the war torn regions suffer but it make it seem miraculous that any functioning human beings emerge from such hell. ( )

On Fragile Waves by E Lily Yu is a novel about Afghani refugees making their way to Australia, with overtones of magical realism. It follows a family as they journey in a dangerous boat and spend time on Nauru, in one of Australia’s off-shore detention centres.

My one hesitation when deciding to read this book was that the author was American. But On Fragile Waves reads as impeccably researched. It follows a family, from the point of the daughter aged around 10, as a lot of terrible things happen to them during their journey and after.

If you know anything about Australia’s offshore detention system, you’ll expect this to be a pretty bleak book, and it is. Moments of darkness are interspersed with Firuzeh telling stories to herself and to her younger brother. Those stories and Firuzeh’s memories of a friend she made on the way provide the fantastical element that put this book on my radar (that and the author). But mostly the book is set in the real world, and the harsh reality of being a refugee doesn’t end just because they reach Australia.

This was a moving read and I recommend it to anyone that isn’t explicitly looking for a light and fluffy read. It’s a book that deals with racism and trauma and even though it’s not long, I didn’t find it to be a quick read.

4 / 5 stars

You can read more of my reviews on my blog. ( )

A really gorgeous little book--Yu manages to take the horrors of the Australian immigration policies and both highlight them as horrors (through both the mundanity and the acute spikes,) and as something through which people survive, albeit clearly traumatized. There's a real tenderness that Yu shows in tending to her characters, and the relationship especially between Firuzeh and Noor, that makes this more than just a kind of trauma porn. There's so much that is human in this book, in the face of the brutal, faced-but-also-faceless immigration policies. ( )

Born into a family of storytellers and dreamers, Firuzeh and Nour. Born in Afghanistan, they follow their parents as they move from Pakistan to Indonesia to Nauru. Always hoping, always storytelling, the family finally settles in Australia. But their new homeland is not the welcoming place they hoped it would be. Neighbors, classmates, and the government make it challenging. Firuzeh’s fantasy dreams of the perfect life shatter and she is forced to find her way in the real world. It took me a while to figure out which family member was telling the story as I moved from chapter to chapter, but the pattern became clear for person’s voice. Once the reader understands the rhythm of the writing, On Fragile Wings is a strong, poetic story about the search for hope even when things around you are fracturing. ( )