What were your favorite descriptions?

Salh paints a beautiful portrait of her nomadic life, pre-war Somalia, and the desert and delicious foods. What were your favorite descriptions?

I enjoyed the description of Salh’s adventures of her younger self herding goats and exploring nature. Her curiosity and respect for nature was evident. Also, during her early days in Mogadishu, one could feel her relief and joy at being back with her sister and being able to be a “kid” in the world around her.

When she described the sunsets when she was a nomad. Also her time with the goats

This really isn’t a description… I laughed out loud in the very beginning, before we really even knew Sahl’s story. The author was sitting in the parking lot at Whole Foods eating sushi! She even seemed to find this astonishing given where she began and what her life in Somalia was like. That comment alone really struck me as it demonstrated the extremes of her life experiences. I also really enjoyed her descriptions of city life. It is very difficult for me to picture what Somalia looks like. Her explanations helped me get the beginnings of a picture. I also think many of her descriptions showed the similarities between her life in Somalia and our lives in the U.S. Sahl liked to find find the latest fashions and spend time with her friends. A lot of us were probably doing the same thing in the late 80’s.

Sahl's time as a nomad; particularly with her goats and her absolute understanding of and delight in nature.

I enjoyed her reflections of her life especially how her childhood experiences as a nomad provided her strength in decision making and indirectly raising a family. Her writing style made you feel that you are joining her on the journey from being a nomad to her journey to a new home.

Her childhood in the desert, herding goats.

From the early pages, I became enamored with Shugri's descriptions of the horizon and her attempts to find the end of the earth only to discover that she could not. Her descriptions of herding the animals and of preparing to move the huts and animals from one location to another were mesmerizing. Shugri's grandmother had everything down to a concise plan and knew exactly how to pack everything and how to load the camels. On page 2, Shugri writes, "When an elder dies, a library is burned." I read a similar quotation in Susan Orlean's The Library Book. It is a poignant quote!

Shugri's descriptions of her environment wherever she was were really excellent. From her time as a nomad through her experience in the orphanage, then Mogadishu, the refugee camp to Canada, she allowed the reader to see it all.

Her coming of age in the Somalia desert through a child’s eye. The innocence and naïveté made it more intriguing.
The descriptions of the landscape, the enlightening on religion and explaining of Somali words while using it in a sentence

Salh had so many great descriptions...one of the reasons I loved the book! A few favorites: running from the warthogs, sticking the twigs in the camel's ear to get him to stand, when she sees the resistance fighter with glazed eyes outside her window, in Canada and staying on the bus until the last stop, the watering hole where the boys and girls would flirt and the darker red soil where it got wet from filling the jugs...just to name a few!

We were gifted throughout this book with beautiful and horrifying word pictures. Some were amazing descriptions of the beauty in her world, and others were extremely disturbing to our Western Culture sensibilities - and frightening to understand that they happened so recently and are still occurring.

Salh’s early life herding goats with her ayeeyo was the most light hearted part of her story. She felt safe with her ayeeyo. Call me a bit crazy, but I enjoyed the passage about the neutering of the small male goat.

The author's descriptions of the Jilal ( the long dry season) of which her nomadic family was at the mercy of transported me to a setting that I knew nothing about. I loved how she described the ending of this season with the words, "when the clouds finally rumbled within, we looked up at the sky with renewed hope. As the desert quenched its thirst, the red earth crackled back to life."