The Other Americans - Rambling Readers

Paperback, 301 pages

English language

Published Feb. 20, 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

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

(1 review)

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

JuanMoreStory@bookrastinating.com 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