✨Book Review✨
Someone Like Us - Dinaw Mengestu

Thank you to @netgalley and @penguinrandomca for an early copy of this one in exchange for my review! This book released on July 30th 🫶🏻

I was going to try to summarize this one myself, but I think the publisher did a great job so here it is:

After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.

He begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel’s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them.

My review:

This was a very well written book that floated through Mamush’s memory and life in a non-linear way. We got a real understanding of his relationship with Samuel and were also provided insight to the immigrant experience in the US from both of their perspectives.

Mamush was what I would call a semi-unreliable narrator and we know that he is struggling with addiction and mental health issues throughout the book.

I thought the photo inserts within the story were a very cool idea, however in the ARC (not sure if more would be added to the finished copy) they were so random and far between that I kind of lost the purpose of them in the first place. I enjoyed this read but did have some issues with the structure and the cohesion of the storytelling.

3.5/5⭐️ for fans of family sagas, those who want to learn more about the immigrant experience in America, as well as those who enjoy the topic of mental health and addiction.

This was a very heavy read. Even though this book had some serious topics, I think the author handled them really well. This was a very moving book that I really enjoyed and I think the way the author wrote this was simply brilliant.