September 1, 2019
Ali's has been a peripatetic life. The Somali is a wanderer, he writes. As a boy, he is taken on a whim by his stepmother from his native Somalia to the Netherlands and then to the great white north of Canada. His father absent, he is raised by the stepmother. Along the way, he acquires a nickname, Sri Lanka, and, at age nine, his first love, a neighbor boy named Yusuf. As he grows up, the feeling of helplessness, he reports, is the only steady thing in his life: I was trying to survive in a world that didn't want me. Violence is commonplace; he is bullied at school and is routinely beaten at home by his odious stepmother. A Muslim, he has no interest in being observant. Instead, as he grows up, he discovers another god: alcohol. As a young adult, he is often homeless, moving from shelter to shelter and job to job. Part confession, part cautionary tale, his memoir concludes on a despairing note, leaving his readers to wonder what kind of future awaits him.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)