A review by boogsbooks
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

adventurous emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

The Shadow King tells the story of the unsung among the Ethiopian armies who fought the Italians during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in the mid-1930s. It asks: What is home? What is honor? What is owed? It’s an intimate look of the pain and glory of war shared mostly through the eyes of Hirut, a servant girl turned soldier. Hirut works for and fights alongside Aster and her husband Kidane. Each character is a person who buries their grief, sadness, and shame in anger, ego, or false ownership. Infuriating and all the more compelling because of it.

A portion of the story is also told through the lens of Ettore, an Italian photographer who has no business being in war. Ettore’s story revolves around his father, where his father comes from, and how that defines him. While I was interested in the layer Ettore’s father added to the book, I felt as though Ettore was here simply to carry the novel’s focus on photography as storytelling. Excerpts throughout the book are told as descriptions of photos. This worked well but made me question the role of Ettore as a central character.

This was my final read of 2020 and it felt like such a fitting ending. It’s epic in all of its forms. It left me reflective, cheering for the underdog, acknowledging pain in repeated history, and finding hope in moving forward.
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