Publishers Weekly
★ 07/29/2019
Mengiste (Beneath the Lion’s Gaze) again brings heart and authenticity to a slice of Ethiopian history, this time focusing on the Italian invasion of her birth country in 1935. While Hirut, a servant girl, and her trajectory to becoming a fierce soldier defending her country are the nexus of the story, the author elucidates the landscape of war by focusing on individuals—offering the viewpoints (among others) of Carlo Fucelli, a sadistic colonel in Mussolini’s army; Ettore Navarra, a Jewish Venetian photographer/soldier tasked with documenting war atrocities; and Haile Selassie, the emperor bearing the weight of his country’s devastation at the hand of the Italians. In Hirut, Mengiste depicts both a servant girl’s low status and the ferocity of her spirit—inspired by the author’s great-grandmother who sued her father for his gun so she could enlist in the Ethiopian army—which allows her to survive betrayal by the married couple she serves and her eventual imprisonment by Fucelli, captured with horrifying detail by Navarra’s camera. Mengiste breaks new ground in this evocative, mesmerizing account of the role of women during wartime—not just as caregivers, but as bold warriors defending their country. (Sept.)
Mary Morris
"Maaza Mengiste has given us a powerful tale of a woman warrior—not some mythical superhero, but a girl who holds on to the memory of her parents and her father’s gun and longs to do battle to avenge their loss. Reminiscent of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior and Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women, this is a compelling story of female empowerment and an epic one at that."
Marlon James
"The Shadow King is a beautiful and devastating work; of women holding together a world ripping itself apart. They will slip into your dreams and overtake your memories."
Salman Rushdie
"A brilliant novel, lyrically lifting history towards myth. It’s also compulsively readable. I devoured it in two days."
NPR - Michael Schaub
"A sprawling, unforgettable epic from an immensely talented author who's unafraid to take risks... [R]endered all the more effective by Mengiste's gift at creating memorable characters... The star of the novel, however, is Mengiste's gorgeous writing, which makes The Shadow King nearly impossible to put down... [O]ne of the most beautiful novels of the year."
Booklist (starred review)
"Monumental... Mengiste's extraordinary characters—shrewd Kidane, militant Aster, the enigmatic cook, narcissistic Italian commander Fucelli, conflicted photographer Ettore, elusive prostitute Fifi, even haunted Selassie—epitomize the impossibly intricate ties between humanity and monstrosity, and the unthinkable, immeasurable cost of survival."
New York Times Book Review - Namwali Serpell
"Lyrical, remarkable... breathtakingly skillful... The reader feels...in the steady hands of a master... Hirut [is] as indelible and compelling a hero as any I've read in years."
Laila Lalami
"The Shadow King is a novel about war and history, both epic in scope and intimate in detail…Maaza Mengiste has a gift for rendering everyone in this story, resister and invader alike, with great nuance and complexity, leaving us with no room for easy judgment. A wonderful book."
Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
"The Shadow King is not a story about helpless victims of colonial conquest. Against the odds, it is written in a key of pride and exaltation, and its characters have the outsize form of national heroes... Mengiste ambitiously stretches her canvas to include colliding perspectives... Stirring."
Aminatta Forna
"One of the most affecting accounts of the terror of war I have ever read, all the more so for the being cloaked in the language of beauty, such that the words and their meaning burn through the senses. The Shadow King is a work borne of rage, a rage made magnificent for its compassion and the story it tells us—that in war there are no winners."
Andrew Sean Greer
"With epic sweep and dignity, Mengiste has lifted this struggle into legend, along with the women who fought in it. Beautiful, horrifying, elegant, and haunted, The Shadow King is a modern classic."
Kirkus Reviews
2019-07-01
An action-filled historical novel by Ethiopian American writer Mengiste (Beneath the Lion's Gaze, 2010).
The Italians who invaded Ethiopia in 1935 under the orders of the man whom the conquered people insist on calling, in quiet resistance, Mussoloni came aching to avenge a loss they had suffered 40 years earlier. They might have remembered how fiercely the Ethiopians fought. Certainly the protagonist of Mengiste's story, a young woman named Hirut, does. In a brief prologue, we find her returning to the capital, where she has not been for decades, in 1974, in order to find an audience with the emperor, Haile Selassie, who is just about to be overthrown. She has a mysterious box, inside of which, Mengiste memorably writes, "are the many dead that insist on resurrection." The box comes from the war nearly 40 years earlier, and it is an artifact full of meaning. Hirut was nothing if not resourceful back then: A servant in a wealthy household, she becomes a field nurse, but as the war deepens, she takes up arms and becomes a fighter herself, "the brave guard of the Shadow King"—the Shadow King being a villager who bore a reasonable enough resemblance to the emperor, who has gone into hiding, to be dressed like him, taught his mannerisms, and sent out in public in order to rally the dispirited Ethiopian people. "There are oaths that hold this world together," Mengiste writes, "promises that cannot be left undone or unfulfilled." Such is the oath that the emperor broke by fleeing the fight. Mengiste is a master of characterization, and her characters reveal just who they are by their actions; always of interest to watch is the Italian colonel Carlo Fucelli, who is determined to win glory for himself, and a soldato named Ettore Navarra, who has learned Amharic and wants nothing more than to live a quiet life, preferably with Hirut by his side. Hirut herself is well rounded and thoroughly fascinating—and not a person to be crossed.
A memorable portrait of a people at war—a war that has long demanded recounting from an Ethiopian point of view.
