Book Summary and Reviews of Jacaranda by Gaël Faye

Book Summary

A major bestseller and prize-winner in France: a young man journeys from Paris to Rwanda to discover the truth about his mother's past and the country of her birth, from the internationally renowned Rwandan-French novelist and hip-hop artist Gaël Faye.

Growing up in mid-1990s Versailles, Milan—the son of a French father and a Rwandan mother—blames his poor academic performance on the emotional trauma of the genocide in his mother's homeland. In truth, it's a convenient excuse: for twelve-year-old Milan, the violence is an abstraction that only reaches him through television broadcasts, disturbing but remote transmissions from a country that seems impossibly distant.

That is, until Milan meets Claude, a small boy with a bandaged head whom Milan's mother introduces as a cousin who has come to France seeking medical treatment for injuries he sustained in the war. Milan excitedly welcomes him as the brother he's always wanted—until, just as quickly as he appeared, Claude is sent back to Rwanda with no warning, leaving Milan heartbroken and confused. Four years will pass until, in the wake of his parents' divorce, Milan visits Rwanda with his mother for the very first time. The boys reunite as teenagers, and he discovers a community that is both more fractured and more vibrant than he could have imagined.

But the trip raises more questions for Milan than it answers—about his family's history, the war and its aftershocks, and whether he can ever truly belong in this deeply traumatized and rapidly evolving country. As the decades pass, Milan continuously returns to Rwanda to unearth the secrets that have taken root in the shadows of long silences, joining the fraught but vital efforts to confront the past and imagine a new kind of future, family, and home.