I wasn't planning on reading Behold the Dreamers this year. In fact, I hadn't even heard of it until the day my school's media specialist recommended it to me. As this woman is one of the best human beings I know and I trust her opinions on books implicitly, I accepted her offer to loan me her copy. I found it waiting for me in my school mailbox the very next day. She really, really wanted me to read this book!
At first, I didn't think that this novel would fit into any of my remaining reading challenge categories. However, when I checked out the blurbs on the first few pages, I noticed that Jacqueline Woodson called Imbolo Mbue's writing "startlingly beautiful, thoughtful, and both timely and timeless." I read Woodson's Another Brooklyn this year and absolutely loved it. I also enjoyed her young adult novel, Brown Girl Dreaming, which I read a few years ago. She is fast becoming one of my favorite authors, and her recommendation meant that Behold the Dreamers qualified for the Popsugar bonus category "a book recommended by an author you love." Happy that I could use this book to keep working through my challenge lists, I dove in.
Behold the Dreamers is about a family of Cameroonian immigrants living in New York City in 2008. The husband of the family, Jende Jonga, has been working for years in a series of low paying jobs to bring his wife, Neni, and their young son, Liomi, into the country. Once he is able to move his whole family into a small apartment in the Bronx, he lands a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy executive at Lehman Brothers, Clark Edwards. His new salary means that he can pay for Neni's college courses, send money home to his parents in Cameroon, and provide a better life for his son. The family's luck improves further when Neni lands a part time job doing some housekeeping work for Mr. Edward's wife Cindy. Both Jende and Neni believe wholeheartedly in the American dream, and feel like they are on their way to happiness and prosperity in the land of opportunity.
After a bit of time passes, however, the truth about living and working in America begins to show through. Jende and Neni both learn some troubling secrets about Clark and Cindy, which threaten to ruin the lucrative arrangement that exists between their families. In addition to that, the economic recession begins and Lehman Brothers declares bankruptcy, further threatening Jende and Neni's jobs. These stresses, combined with Jende's ongoing issues obtaining his green card, cast a dark shadow over both their marriage and their future prospects in America. Eventually, the family is forced to face difficult truths about what the American dream really is and whether their hard work and desire can actually help them achieve it.
This novel was simply phenomenal. I was pulled in from page one and breezed through the whole thing in just a few days. Mbue's writing is thoughtful and complex without being difficult to understand. She has a way of writing that speaks to your soul; I really came to care for all of the characters, despite their flaws, and was rooting for everyone to find a way through their troubles. Jende and Neni were both beautifully developed and felt like real people. Their Cameroonian culture showed through nicely as well, with memories, cooking, and conversation with other Cameroonian immigrants conveying a good sense of what their homeland was like and their complicated feelings towards it. I felt like I learned something about both their country and my own, since the immigrant experience of living here is so different from the life of someone born here.
Mbue uses the story to comment on the reality of immigrant life and the idea of the American dream in ways that were interesting and thought-provoking, but not preachy or political. Jende and Neni both work extremely hard to achieve their goals of providing better lives for their family, but struggle with elements that lay outside their control, like immigration laws, the cost of living in New York, the high tuition charged to international students, and economic downturns. In particular, the effect of the Great Recession on immigrants was interesting to explore. Many immigrants earned their livelihoods working service jobs for the wealthy, and the troubles on Wall Street became serious troubles for them once their employers began cutting back on extra luxuries like maids, nannies, and chauffeurs. I hadn't thought about things from that perspective before, and I enjoyed exploring it.
The juxtaposition between Jende and Neni and the Edwards family was very well done. While the two families couldn't be more different from each other in matters of wealth and lifestyle, they both shared very similar feelings about the importance of family and how to raise children, among other topics. These similarities allow both families to get along well with each other, for the most part. At the same time, there's a beautiful irony hiding in their differences. While Clark and Cindy have incredible wealth, the process of obtaining it means that they are unable to achieve true happiness for their family. Jende and Neni live extremely modestly and don't have very much money, but they are able to maintain the type of relationship with their child that the Edwards wish they had. The idea that money can't buy happiness is an old one, but Mbue's treatment of it is thoughtful and nuanced.
Immigration, both legal and illegal, is a hot topic in the news today. Behold the Dreamers, while set almost ten years ago, still makes very relevant points about immigrant life in America. I would venture to say that this is an important read for people seeking to understand more about why immigrants choose to come here and what they must go through to stay and be successful. It also makes you question the validity of the American dream, which is a lovely sentiment, but may not ring true for everyone attempting to go after it. This book is one that makes you think and makes you care about other people in the world, and I can offer no higher endorsement of a work than that. This book, which, shockingly, is Mbue's first, is a triumph. She is definitely an author that I will be looking out for in the future. This is one of my favorite reads of the year so far and one that I, much like my media specialist friend, will be pushing into the hands of others.
Challenge Tally
Popsugar Bonus Challenge (a book recommended by an author you love): 6/12
Total Books Read in 2017: 58
No comments:
Post a Comment
So, what do you think?