Thank you for the opportunity to read this book, however it's just not for me. I've tried to start this several time over the years but it's a horrific story that I couldn't bear to read. I've heard fantastic things about the book though but it's too much for me to read.

An incredible work on nonfiction. It's raw, real, and moving. It shows the worst of humanity and the best in the fight to move past the terrible events that changed lives and ravished a country.

When I first heard about ‘The Girl Who Smiled Beads’, I knew I needed to read it. The synopsis was utterly fascinating, but also heartbreaking – and I knew that the book would draw me in, and teach a valuable lesson. This book was a beautifully written, absolutely harrowing memoir of Wamariya’s story.

The story was extremely atmospheric, which made it all the more devastating, but also profound. The fact that it was from the perspective of a child, made it all the more devastating. It was a deep, gutting and hopeful story which I would recommend to anyone.

One key part of the book which I will always go back to is the fact that Wamariya would write her name anywhere she could. On car windows, street signs etc. She would etch her name everywhere and anywhere, in hope that her parents would see it and know she was alive.

If you enjoy reading memoirs, please pick this one up.

I cannot honestly review this book. I feel that I would be patronising a woman whose bravery is beyond my comprehension. It's a challenging book from which you can only draw your own learning. It deserves to be read. That's all I feel qualified to say.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads is a shocking, heartbreaking true story of a six year old girl who survived the Rwandan genocide. Almost 1 million people were slaughtered in the genocide that little Clemantine managed to escape, fleeing the country together with her older sister but with no parents. Thus began their refugee journey, an unforgiving and brutal fight for survival which lasted six long years until the older sister was no longer a child and the younger sister was not either.

"Adults in Rwanda do not cry. Children can cry until they learn to speak. Then it's time to stop."

After six years and living in six African countries, Clemantine and her sister were granted asylum in the United States, where they could have a fresh start. Many people want to help the sisters but Clemantine is too mentally scarred and distrusful to appreciate and accept their kindness after so many years with no home, no mother and nowhere to belong to. Her struggles, although different from the ones in Africa, continue as she tries to learn how to love herself and embrace who she is.

This was not an easy read for me as Clemantine tells her story in an honest unfiltered way revealing the hardship her and her sister had to endure. I was too young to notice the Rwandan genocide when it happened but I remember seeing The Rwanda Hotel as a teenager which I had nightmares about for a while. I don't think people outside Africa know enough about what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Books like this one are important to make people realise atrocious things like this still happen and the holocaust was not the last one in the history as many might believe.

"Every human life is equally valuable. Each person's story is vital. This is just one."

Many thanks to Penguin Random House UK for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

I came to this book completely ignorant of the Rwandan genocide or the refugee experience. And although this is just the story of one girl, one family, I feel I have learned so much. Not only the timeline and events, but the human factor. Because this is such a human book. It draws on the childhood memories of a girl displaced from her family for reasons she doesn't fully understand, into a life of constant upheaval, fear and poverty with only her older sister to share the years of camps and hunger with. The injustice of the genocide is a constant note throughout, though despite her confessions of self pity not once does Clemantine come across as anything other than incredibly strong. Particularly in her years in America, adjusting to a society so very different to where she had come from and trying to come to terms with all she'd been through in a totally removed environment. With all that's laid bare in this memoir, the quality of the writing should be inconsequential. But the story is told with simple yet effective prose, without sensationalist detail but with a beauty and honesty that I value so much in a memoir. A brilliant book, which has left me keen to learn more about Rwanda, and the refugee experience of those caught in it from all sorts of situations and conflicts.

This book tore me to tiny pieces and made me cherish my life so much more. The things I've complained about seem so trivial compared to what Clemantine and her family went through. It also made me realize how little I know about what has happened in the world. I've lived in my tiny little bubble and I'm not sure if I want to burst it after finding out about these atrocities.

Clemantine has such a gorgeous way with words and this book was so heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and at times vomit inducing. I can't wrap my head around what kind of a life a refugee lives. I just hope that I will never have to endure anything like that and I've so much respect for everyone who has come out of it stronger than ever.

I could fill this review with quotes that pinched at my heart, but I shall leave with this one. Read it, learn from it.

"We need to say: I honor the things that you respect and I value the things you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me. Nobody is better than anybody else. Nobody is who you think they are at first glance. We need to see beyond the projections we cast onto each other. Each of us is so much grander, more nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves."

So happy to be given a whole budget to replenish our senior shelves in the school library. The books in there are far from appealing at the moment and I have been delighted to find books here that will intrigue, captivate and engross my senior students.

This is a fantastic read which I feel will both challenge young people and give them much to think about. We currently study Fergal Keane's writing about Rwanda and I feel like this will provide a fascinating counterbalance to Keane's writing.

It's great to read a book that does not feel formulaic and gives some credit to their reader's intelligence too. Young people are very fussy about the books they choose to read and in this time-precious day and age it really has to be something above and beyond the ordinary to get them to put down their devices and get their noses stuck in a book.

I think this is one book that will capture their imagination and keep them turning the pages until the end. This is definitely going onto my 'must-buy' list and I really look forward to seeing what the young people themselves think of this thought provoking, shocking and wonderfully-written book.

Clemantine flees Rwanda at the age of six with her 16 year old sister Claire, who is one hardworking independent and entrepreneurial woman. They spend six years in Africa trying to find a life, maybe their parents and maybe some happiness. They then find themselves as migrants in the US. This sounds like another refuge story but this book is written in a way I have yet to come across. There is a raw emotion, anger and recognition that ever refugee's story is different and no one can ever really understand what that person has seen, suffered and survived.
The chapters tend to flick between life in the US which Clementine could not initially understand and life in Africa where they went from one war torn poverty ravaged country to another. The way the story was told in each of these times was in a different tone that worked really well.
Clemantine's messages are very powerful and extremely effectively told. It made me reassess how I see people in need.

This is the third book I’ve read this year based around the Rwandan genocide. Each book has been haunting, heartbreaking and tragic – this book is no different. I didn’t want to be reminded about that period again but it is compelling and inspirational to see how humanity can survive those atrocities. The scars are permanent and it is with great sadness that we listen to a real story and the impact hatred and destitution has on another human life.

Clementine is a young girl who along with her older sister, Claire, manages to escape the gruesome massacres in Rwanda in 1994. They travel through 6 countries in Africa through all sorts of life-threatening danger and unrest, before finally arriving in the USA. The book covers two periods, one as Clementine and Claire struggle to survive in Africa and the other in the United States that takes us up to the present day.

As they flee Rwanda and live in refugee camps in Burundi, every day is monotonous and is filled with “bugs, filth, hunger and death.” When they say bugs they mean infestations of lice and bugs that burrow into your feet. The only way out is to build a relationship with someone on the outside which Claire does through marriage and they move to Zaire (Dem Republic of Congo). While there, Claire has a baby and the racial violence follows them, so they escape to Tanzania, where they become refugees again. This continues through Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. They were“refugee-camp connoisseurs, sad, nationless, pros.”.

It is difficult to understand how the mind processes horror and interactions with others, where best intentions are often received as insults or reminders of horrors. Sometimes to just want space from everyone’s attempt to help, to feel pressured, harassed and pitied is a wound you can’t afford to let open. Clementine provides us with an insight into how she adapted to protect her feelings and vulnerabilities and perhaps sought isolation. There is just “coming and going and coming and going and dying.” Her account of life in Africa and the reality of how women, refugees and different tribes are treated is powerful. Don’t be fooled with propaganda as it is easier to turn a blind eye to atrocities rather than deal with them. An issue she deals with to the present day.

It is a harrowing yet inspirational story, of how faced with the devastation of everything you thought you were and could be, and how a life can be pieced back together to succeed. Still reminded of those events Clementine tries to connect all the pieces together saying

“Often, still, my own life story feels fragmented, like beads unstrung. Each time I scoop up my memories, the assortment is slightly different. I worry, at times that I’ll always be lost inside.”

In this story, I also absolutely admire Claire as a resourceful, hard-working and determined person that is recognised equally as the main focus of this book. She too has been permanently shaped by the experiences she’s encountered and always sought to drive forward in the face of all obstacles.

I would like to thank Random House UK, Cornerstone and NetGalley for an ARC version of the book in return for an honest review.

How would you cope if you were a happy six-year-old, but then one day your entire world is turned upside down when everyone in your country starts killing each other? Without much warning you are left without a home, family and no country. For the next six years you are an exile, a sub-human, just trying to survive by fulfilling your most basic needs. This is Clementine’s story – but as she constantly reminds us throughout the book, not only hers but thousands and thousands of other refugees as well.

By sharing her story, as well as her sister Clare’s, we can also see, as with everything in life, people react very differently to the same situation. A reminder that every refugee is a unique individual and wants to be seen and treated as such.

I admire people who can share their lives while allowing us to see their insecurities, vulnerabilities and doubts about themselves and their relationships. I don’t think that I could be that brave.
Thinking of all the millions of children who has never had a childhood, safety, care or the opportunity to just be seen as a unique human being, and the effect this will have on them as an adult, is deeply distressing.

This is a deeply personal account of a young girl who is trying to make peace with all she has lost and can never regain, trying to braid her different lives into one narrative. The Girl Who Smiled Beads is also a timely reminder that these devastating events – war/genocide – happens to individuals and not to a country.

This book has been on my Book Depository wishlist for so long! Way before it was launched, so when I saw it up on Netgalley for review I was so excited to get in there and read it. I read 100 pages in the first sitting. I really wanted to read a book that was deep and personal and I definitely found it in The Girl Who Smiled With Beads.

The book starts us off in 2006, the night before Clemantine was going to be on the Oprah show. Already, the passion and the emotion came through in each and every one of these words with purpose. I felt myself immersed and felt so connected to everything that was happening to Clemantine and her sister Claire. We find out that Clemantine had come to America as a refugee when she was 13 and was originally from Rwanda. I didn’t know much about the war in Rwanda and that is had dispossessed so many people, to be fair I was only 5 at the time, the sad thing is. So was Clemantine.

The story beautifully transitions from a future year, back to a past year in a way that you know that Clemantine is differentiating from her life in Chicago (America) and her life in Rwanda and the refugee camps scattered across North and South Africa. The way that Clemantine describes her childhood and her life before the war is captivating, as is her strength and wisdom (much beyond her years). The way in which she writes is breathtaking and I loved looking at life through her eyes, whether it was brutality, happiness or confusion. The incorporation of the Rwandon language, Kinyarwanda was a touch that was not expected at all, and I appreciate that Clemantine shared that part of her culture and life with me as a reader.

This story depicts a wonderful yet tragic story about a young girl who loses a lot and fights to keep her place in the world. I gained so much insight into the world of refugees and how important their stories are. The recounts of her experiences seeing dead bodies, war, famine, disease and despair are eye-opening and heartbreaking. I had never known anything about the genocide in Rwanda and it was a haunting experience reading about her life, a read that I really am grateful for.

I have read about the Rwanda genocide before and because of that I was hesitant to pick up this memoir. In fact, one of the books I could not even finish it was so brutal.

This is not just a book about the Rwanda genocide, nor about a refugee coming to America, or rising from adversity. Its about losing your family, your culture, your country and your identity at the age of 6 and how this had a ripple effect in Clemantine’s life for many years to come.

Before reading this, I watched the video insert where Clemantine and her sister Claire was reunited with their family on the Opera show. Its impossible to watch that and not feel anything.

It took Clemantine a very long time to find the words to describe what she went through. And when she finally found the words they were often times filled with rage.

The story also shows how dehumanizing it is to be labelled, and live as, a refugee

I found so much of the book insightful, the experiences the sisters had in different African countries, the shock of coming to America, the land of noise and plenty and the way each dealt with their trauma.

Their mother held on to her faith and lived every day in gratitude for the smallest things. Their father shut down. Claire, the industrious planner and hustler dealt with her trauma by DOING.

And Clemantine? Well, on the outside she looks like the most successful in life as she became the Oprah girl and the posterchild for Western refugee efforts, but she struggled the most as she internalized too much.

I think she struggles still.

Sometimes the narrative felt a little incomplete, especially the last 1/3. Its as if Clemantine wanted to convey the feeling or essence of an event rather than explain the whole event. This is not a deal breaker in reading or rating this book highly, but it was noticeable.

This book gives insight into human suffering you never ever want to experience yourself. Absolutely worth the read.

How can you give a rating to a memoir? It is what it is - one person’s story, unique to her, and told with a truly distinctive voice. This is Clemantine’s recollections of events that led her to leave her home in Rwanda and seek a place of safety, her understanding of the effect her experiences as a refugee in Africa and as an immigrant to the US have had on her. It is a story of courage, honesty and self-awareness. That she has felt able to tell it at all means 5 stars from me.

As for the structure of the book and the quality of the writing, 5 stars again. We have chapters describing the years 1994-2000 in Africa interspersed with post-2000 in America. I think this works better than a straight chronological account as the American experience has had a huge impact on Clemantine and the way she looks back at her early years. There is little here about Rwanda’s emergence from catastrophe - Clemantine didn’t go back there for many years and was busy building a new life. Towards the end, though, people she meets fill in a few of the gaps.

Her writing is vital and engaging, and I was swept up in her story from beginning to end. I felt involved, too, in her analysis of her relationships with her sister, her family and those people who helped her along the way.

A couple of passages struck me particularly.

‘I did not feel lost, as “lost” implies that there’s a place where you will feel found and that, for me, did not exist. I was just a feather, molted and mangled, drifting through space.’

‘When you’re traumatised, your sense of self, your individuality, is beaten up. Your skin color, your background, your pain, your hope, your gender, your faith, it’s all defiled. Those essential pieces of yourself are stolen. You, as a person, are emptied and flattened, and that violence, that theft, keeps you from embodying a life that feels like your own. To continue to exist, as a whole person, you need to recreate, for yourself, an identity untouched by everything that’s been used against you. You need to imagine and build a self out of elements that are not tainted. You need to remake yourself on your own terms.’

I knew from the blurb that this would be a raw and haunting book but I wasn’t at all prepared for how harrowing Clemantine’s story is (and as she so eloquently writes in her memoirs, her story is one of millions of victims and survivors of war). I cannot stop thinking about it.

As a teenager I vaguely remember details about Rwanda and the genocide from the news. Whilst 6 year old Clemantine and her 15 year old sister Claire were walking across a continent, fleeing for their lives, living in unbearable conditions, I was just a couple of years younger than Claire; learning about the Holocaust in my history lessons, completely unaware of what was happening right at that moment to girls my age (and much younger) across the equator. There aren’t really any sufficient words to describe that injustice.

To me, the most important aspect of this book is it being a woman telling her own story, choosing what to include and how to relay her experiences, to be the narrative of her own memories. Too many times it is the women’s voices in these situations that aren’t heard, often erased or silenced. Not in this book. There are aspects of her story that Clemantine Wamariya clearly did not want to relay in minute detail and are subtly hinted at or glossed over. Throughout her time in various refugee camps and whilst displaced, Clemantine states she felt invisible, forgotten and exposed, these are her experiences laid bare, as true as she can remember, and she gets to make all of the decisions.

The timeline of the book swaps between her younger years as a refugee and her transition from adolescence to adulthood after settling in America. I found this differing narrative helped to dissipate the overwhelming horror of her time in Africa but also to show how the events of her past had a causal link to everything she experienced as she adjusted to her new life. She states her memories were not always there until prompted sometime later and by structuring the book in this jumbled way you see how things appear connected but unbalanced as Clemantine struggles to adjust and take stock of her experiences.

I loved reading about her determination to get an education (and her successful application to Yale), her discovery of the power of yoga, but most of all her love of works by Toni Morrison, Audre Lord, Elie Wiesel, Maya Angelou, W.G. Sebald etc that she credits in the acknowledgements for “creating many paths to find my own beat”. I’m sure this book will be a similar gift to many.

This book offers such an insight, such a lesson in the human cost of conflict, particularly for children. This is a story that is sadly not unique, it is repeated throughout history, throughout the world, and is happening right now, in Syria, in Myanmar, in Yemen. It is easy to see the despair and long-lasting effects that such a brutal experience has on Clemantine and those around her, but there’s also the strength, determination, sincere acts of kindness (often by women, and women who had very little to give but gave anyway), and pure grit of two women who refused to become nameless or be defined by tragedy.

A story everyone should read; it is one of those books that allows the author to speak their truth, that allows us in turn to better ourselves. I send my thanks to publisher Hutchinson and Netgalley for sending me a copy that I could review entirely in my own words.

"The word genocide is clinical, overly general, bloodless and dehumanising. "Oh, its like that holocaust?" people would say to me - say to me still.
To this day I do not know how to respond and be polite.
No, I want to scream, it's not like the Holocaust. Or the killing fields in Cambodia. Or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. There's no catchall term that proves you understand.
There's no label to peel and stick that absolves you, shows you've done your duty, you've completed the moral project of remembering.
This - Rwanda, my life - is different, specific, personal tragedy, just as each of those horrors was a different, specific, personal tragedy and inside all those tidily tabled boxes are 6 million, or 1.7 million or 100,000 or 100 billion lives destroyed.
You cannot line up the atrocities like a matching set.
You cannot bear witness with a single word." (Quote from the book)

This book is a must read, in my option.

It tells you a part of history in such a honest and real way, takes you to the nice days before the bad days started, takes you through the horrible life of having to leave everything -your family, home and everything that gives you comfort- behind in seconds, and leaving you with the only human instinct: Survival.

This book takes you on a journey.

Its not necessarily a good one, but an important one none the less.

Its not a good one because its so honest.

It really talks about the good, the bad and everything in between that humanity has to offer.

It shows us that even those that try to help can sometimes to a lot of harm.
Be it with words or actions or expectations.
No matter how much good intention they have or how well they are meaning it, this book really shows us that if you haven't lived it, you don't understand.
And thats not a bad thing!
Everyones story is unique (which the book also clearly stats and its so TRUE! and i loved that it was so focused on saying "this is my story, this is just one story of what happened in Rwanda, not THE story!") and while some people might better understand what others go through or survived through... nobody really understand if you where there.

And even if you where there, lived through the same, its still your own unique story.

In the book itself Clemantine talks about her experience and later on mentions that her sister always tells the same story differently. So even thought both of them lived through the same days, through the same events, they remember it completely differently.

And that i just how life is.

Which might sound depressing, but i think that is what makes us all so unique and that is what we all have to remember.

Everyone has a story to tell, and especially those that survived through horrendous humanity caused tragedies have to tell theirs, to remind everyone what is at stake, what could be happening, what has happened and that we all have to work together to not let it happen again or let it continue.


READ THIS BOOK.

And be swapped away into a horrendous, tragic, beautiful life story that makes you think, makes you connect and understand while also starting to question things.

READ IT and LEARN!

This was a fabulous memoir by a Rwandan refugee.  I vaguely remember hearing about the troubles over there when I was in college.  The author, Clemantine, talks about how at the age of six, her and her older sister, Claire, had to escape from Rwanda and leave their parents behind.  What ensues is seven years of wandering, hunger, and pure survival. I was afraid this book would be graphic and hard to read but thankfully, the book focused on Clemantine's struggle with healing and feeling worthy of a new life in America.

https://jolenewilsonblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/weekend-wrap-up-30

This is an incredibly brave and beautiful book - parts of it moved me to tears while other parts had me in awe of her bravery. Clementine escaped the Rwandan genocide and then spent much of her life as a refugee, moving from country to country and camp to camp. She suffered unimaginable horrors, which are described in this book sensitively and honestly. More than this though, the lasting impact of her early life on her later experiences is so significant - even though she was safely placed with caring people in America, she describes how she never quite felt safe. Took my breath away, a brilliant book.

Clemantine Wamariya's story is an education for the reader. Writing with Elizabeth Weil, she tells the story of her flight across Africa from the horrors in Rwanda. In no way in a review is it possible to portray the impact of her torn childhood on Clemantine and her elder sister Claire, but I encourage you to read this book to appreciate in some small way the consequences that last a lifetime and more. A harrowing story, written so well.