I Hope You Find What You're Looking For by Bsrat Mezghebe (audiobook)

genre: historical fiction

For middle schooler Lydia, DC is home.  For her mother Elsa, however, "home" will always be Eritrea in Africa, a tiny country under the thumb of Ethiopia that has struggled for decades to win its independence.  This story goes back and forth in time as we experience the tightly knit Eritrea immigrant community in DC as well as Elsa's upbringing and experiences as a rebel fighter in the war.  When a distant cousin comes to live with them, Lydia is forced to look closer at her own mind and at the things she's always taken for granted.

The "current" time in the book is actually my own high school years and Lydia was born the same year I was, so it is crazy for my brain to make sense of her world versus my own, at the same time period.  Lydia wants so much to understand her own family, that yearning for herself making her show up as a really frustrating teenager sometimes. But I became so invested in these characters.  I adored Mama Zewdi, the matriarch of the family and as much as Elsa was like a closed book much of the time, I felt so much compassion for the trauma she'd endured.  I liked that this is a DC story, with so many of the places familiar haunts to me.  And I think, in the end, this story is about the triumph of human nature finding empathy and kindness even in the face of true horror.  It is about what we do for the family we're given and the family we choose and it is about love of country and culture and the ties that can bind us even from a world away.

Excellent narration.