Place of Cool Waters
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
When Jude Wilson decides to travel halfway across the world to visit the graves of his childhood Boy Scout heroes, he unwittingly signs up for a lot more than he imagined. Growing up in the placid little Pacific Northwest town of Clarksville could never adequately prepare him for what he encounters in the vibrant, mercurial streets of Nairobi, where context defines meaning and words alone are not always sufficient to communicate across a cultural gap. He meets Qadir Mohamed—the affable manager at the youth hostel where he is staying—and a valuable friendship develops between two people from disparate backgrounds with seemingly little in common.
In Kenya, the past is never far away, though it is sometimes remembered differently by insiders. As a result, the unexamined triumphal legends from Jude's scouting days begin to unravel in the face of new discoveries. It is, however, a disastrous taxi ride and ensuing case of mistaken identity that emerge as the defining moments of this life-changing trip, leading him to stumble upon truths about himself that he was previously unaware of.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The satisfactory latest from Githaiga (Ten Thousand Rocks) follows a young Black man raised by an adoptive family in Washington State and a Somali orphan trying to find his way in Kenya. As a boy, Jude Wilson enjoys camping with his father and thrives as a Boy Scout. After college, he settles in Seattle, where he deals with a racist supervisor who unfairly criticizes his work (a white colleague proves it by swapping their names on their reports, but the naive Jude is slow to accept the truth). In a parallel narrative, Qadir Mohamed, a Somali orphan in Nairobi, deals with Kafkaesque requests for paperwork before he can attend college. Later, in 2013, he experiences anti-Somali prejudice from Kenyans after Somali terrorists attack a shopping center. After Jude's former scouting mate dies from cancer, he decides to pursue his dream of visiting Boy Scouts founder Lord Baden-Powell's grave in Kenya. On the way to the remote grave site, Jude is robbed and abandoned by his driver. He finds help from a stranger and later learns of a connection between himself and Qadir, who happens to manage the hostel he's staying at. Though the plot is a bit contrived and the timeline is confusing, Githaiga effectively builds a series of crisis points as the characters navigate their lives. This is worth a look. (Self-published)
