I found The Boat People to be a truly timely and moving book. The story of a father's escape with his young son, having lost everything and every one, is heartfelt. Sadly, I had very little idea of the travesty that is the recent history of Sri Lanka. Thanks to the author's description, it was very easy to picture the devastating life under war time and to believe that most people, and certainly most parents, would go to any length to protect themselves and their family.
I appreciated the manner the author used to layer the back story of the main character, holding just enough information back to keep us slightly uncertain if we should be rooting for him, while making him very sympathetic as a father struggling to hold things together for his child. All of the supporting characters were given a believable level of humanity, with interesting and correlating stories of their own.
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In a visually-rich and spirited poem, called Home, the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire writes:

you have to understand,

no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land.

The heaviness of those words echo throughout the contemplative and heart-warming story Sharon Bala tells in The Boat People.  It is a singularly profound tale that is extremely relevant for our present times and forces us to  confront the issue of criminalizing people fleeing from unspeakable conflict and who find themselves as refugees in countries where they do not receive the warm welcome they have hoped for and expected. This is the case when a boat full of five hundred people - men, women and children -arrives on the shores of Canada seeking refugee. Among them are Mahindan and his young son Sellian. An upright and steadfastly decent man, Mahindan is still grieving the loss of his dearly beloved wife, whom we are introduced to in a series of poignant and charming flashbacks woven throughout the story. It is the determination to give their son a chance at a life 'uncircumscribed by war' that fuels his drive throughout the story. For the Canadians who receive the refugees, their empathy must be measured with the cautious suspicion that nestled within this large number of people, could be terrorists who are seeking to unleash violence on their shores and disrupt the peace of the society that they are coming into. With prose of immeasurable simplicity, Ms. Bala delivers a gift from the heart. She effortlessly gives a human face to what many news reports have reduced to numbers and statistics s and dives into the complexity of the situations that refugees are fleeing from and what compels them to make the harrowing decision to make a perilous sea voyage to safety. And while it is a fictional tale, so much of this is anchored in our present day reality that it is difficult to ignore the real life events that undoubtedly influenced this story.

We may have all come on different ships but we're in the same boat now. Martin Luther King Jr.
Who leaves their home unless under duress? The place of one's nativity, where one's ancestors are buried, the house that contains so many memories are not given up lightly. To be a refugee, an immigrant, means to be cast off freewheeling into the unknown mists of the future, without mooring or a known destination.

The Boat People is Sharon Bala's debut novel.

Mahindan fled Sri Lanka with his son Sellian when there was nothing left. The Tamil Tigers had been fighting for their rights under the Singhs for years, turning both the willing and the unwilling into terrorists. The United Nations had pulled out and there was no protection. His wife dead, his village bombed, Mahindan and his son join the stream of refugees, ending up in a camp. Their suffering becomes unendurable, the dream of Canada enchanting. Mahindan raises money for a boat out of Sri Lanka.

Arriving in Canada, the 503 refugees are secluded in holding places, women and children in one place and the men in another, families broken apart. Mahindan is on trial to prove he is not a Tiger terrorist, while his son goes to a foster home and becomes Westernized.

Priya represents the legal counsel for the refugees, sidelined into the work because of her Tamil heritage. She is resentful as she wanted experience in corporate law, and because she identifies as Canadian whose grandparents happen to be from Sri Lanka. The refugee work is exhausting and disturbing. Then her uncle reveals the truth of her family's past.

Grace is a temporary government assigned lawyer. Canada is immersed in xenophobia and fear. All Tamils are considered possible terrorists and she is to do everything possible to find reasons to deport the boat people back to Sri Lanka.

Grace's grandmother in suffering the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, which brings old memories to the forefront. An Issei, first generation Japanese Canadian, she becomes an activist for the Japanese Canadians who were interred during WWII, losing their homes and businesses which now have become valuable real estate. She warns Grace that she is participating in the same kind of racism experienced the Japanese--everyone in a group considered an enemy until proven innocent.

I learned about Canada's parallels to American fear of foreigners as potential terrorists and about the history of Sri Lanka in modern times.

The Boat People is similar to other books I have recently read, such as This Is How It Begins by Joan Dempsey, warning about the implication of current events through the lens of our admitted past mistakes, and involving a courtroom setting.

Sharon Bala's book is interesting and thoughtful, a fine addition to recent novels addressing timely issues in immigration, post 9-11 fears, and learning how to connect our past mistakes to our current policy. Read an excerpt at http://sharonbala.com/excerpt

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

This novel takes a very close and detailed look at the inner workings of the immigration system in Canada. A boat full of Sri Lankan refugees comes to Canadian shores among rumors of some of the prospective immigrants having been part of a group labeled a terrorist organization. The book moves between characters and timelines to give a full and critical picture of the immigration process. Very informative and thought-provoking, but the book may be trying to do too many things at once and the narrative sometimes gets bogged down in the telling.

I was unable to complete this book. The electronic version I received was apparently defective. It would jump around resulting in chucks of the story being missed. I had to try to jump back and forth trying to get the correct page to come up. I finally gave up on it.

From what I could read it is a very interesting story. I want to know what happens to Manhindan and his son. I also want ot know the stories of Priya and Grace. Hopefully I can get an ARC on GoodReads. Otherwise I will be waiting until its release in January.

The Boat People is the fictional story of one man and his son's experience fleeing Sri Lanka. In addition to his experience, we follow a young lawyer and one of the governmental employees assigned to determine who stays in Canada and who is to be deported. I knew nothing about the history of the Tamil people and the plight of those who attempted to flee not just to Canada but to Australia. In the looming fear of terrorism, the determination of who stays and who is returned to almost certain death is left to somewhat arbitrary rules. It is often just the word of the refugee, and the fear that they could lie is ever present. This story is beautifully told from three diverse perspectives .