Initially, I wondered if the ferry that he and Vänna took to the mainland in the previous chapter had capsized and they had perished after everything they went through but, on reassessment, this didn’t make sense. I re-read the final chapter multiple times in an attempt to understand it. Because of the description of the locket on the recovered body, we know it’s Amir. The book ends with a dead child being lifted and separated from a number of dead by a masked and gloved worker on a beach. And then I got to the end, ii and I was simply confused. But What Strange Paradise was coming off as something common, something that could have been written by someone lacking his writing skills and firsthand experience. And also knowing that he had experience as a journalist reporting on the war in Afghanistan and Arab Spring, I expected something more-some important insights into the refugee crisis, for example.

Having been blown away by El Akkad’s previous work, American War, 2 I knew he had the ability to do something phenomenal with a story. It was honestly about halfway through my first reading when I recall struggling to understand what the point of the story was and who this was directed at, whether the explanation was as simple as an author attempting to humanize refugees and other migrants or if there was something else I was missing. The plot is broken up into chapters alternating between the events leading up to the incident (labelled as Before chapters)––explaining what brought Amir and the others there––and the aftermath (After chapters), where the native-born, teenaged Vänna attempts to help Amir evade the soldiers tasked at keeping undesirables out of the country.

El Akkad’s story involves the wreckage of a boat filled with Middle Eastern and African migrants washing up on a (presumably) Greek island, i and Amir, a Syrian child, is the sole survivor. I suspect at least some people who have read the book will be a bit surprised at a suggestion that What Strange Paradise is a difficult book, because it doesn’t appear as such from the outset, the truth doesn’t reveal itself until fairly close to the end, and the revelation itself proves to be obscure. And so I felt a need to expand these ideas in an attempt to create something that’s hopefully a bit more useful, a bit more meaningful, in the end, which is what I’ll try to do here. 1 While I think I did well within the confines of a 150 word review to as clearly as possible express the truth as I knew it, I also understand important limits of doing so while making enough sense of things to make my criticism useful, meaningful, within that space.

I decided to once again take a hiatus from book reviewing, but I inadvertently chose a difficult book to end on: Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise.

Omar el akkad