I keep telling myself I’m going to start a YouTube channel documenting this trip-around-the-world-in-books. And I keep not doing it. So obviously, I don’t care that much.

Anyways, I just finished reading The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste for the country of Ethiopia. I can’t remember why I decided to do Ethiopia; honestly, I think I was watching the Olympic Marathon Trials, thinking about running, and wanted to read a book from a country with a deep running history, so Ethiopia it was.

The Shadow King follows the story of a young maid named Hirut, a leader named Kidane, his wife Aster, a Jewish Italian photographer named Ettore, and various other Ethiopians and Italians as they navigate the Italian invasion into Ethiopia in 1935. Readers see an overall perspective; we see and hear the thoughts and actions of both the Ethiopians and the Italians. This is definitely a strength of the novel. Mengiste develops a tense connection between Hirut (who becomes a POW for a time) and the Jewish Ettore; both are on the oppressed-by-the-Axis-powers side of WWII. Mengiste also has a gift for writing grandiose descriptions. As a reader, I often felt like I had a “sense” of the place / setting, even if I couldn’t visualize exactly what was happening.

The novel is supposed to be about women who fought in the war, but it is mostly about intra-familial conflict (between Hirut, Aster, and Kidane) and the relationships between military commanders and their soldiers. There is some exploration of what it means to be a soldier. The narrative does progress from these small-scale stories to a much larger picture of Ethiopia in 1935, and Hirut’s role in the novel grows in parallel with this plot growth, so in that sense, it does tell a national-level narrative.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. Mengiste has put together a website called Project 3541, which contains pictures of Ethiopian soldiers during the war, so it makes the book come alive to look through the pictures as you are reading the novel. However, the pacing of the novel itself is uneven and the wording feels awkward at times. I thought maybe it was because the book was a translation, but it was originally published in English. There are some Amharic and Italian words scattered throughout though. Overall, I’m glad I read it – it comes up often in searches of books for Ethiopia and I learned about the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, but it did take a while to get through.

TW: several episodes of SA and one of borderline CSA.