The Shadow King

Written By Linda Malek
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The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste
Reviewed by Linda
📘📘📘

I was really excited to read The Shadow King and not because I’d heard so much about it but rather a wartime book about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia was the first-class ticket my mind needed to get out of 2020.

There is absolutely no doubt that Mengiste did her research. This is deeply inspired and based on Mengiste’s own great-grandmother who fought in Haile Selassie’s army. The representation of courageous and devoted women who served Ethiopia with zeal, made me brim with pride and I can see why on this premise alone The Shadow King is shortlisted for @thebookerprizes.

But the way this story fell FLAT was no joke.

Each description was so vivid and authentic but I can’t actually tell you guys what happened. After a gripping start with much promise, I soon became bored and zoned out. For a wartime book, the pace and action was off and there were so many long uneventful periods that added to my level of disengagement.

Adding to my frustration and perhaps due to my own lack of understanding, there weren’t any speech marks during character dialogue and so when there were several conversing in one go I just couldn’t follow!? Then it got to a point where I just couldn’t piece the sequence of events together at all and that’s when this book became really heavy in my hands so it was a race to finish whilst skimming through to the end. Don’t even get me started on the ending🧐

I really wanted to love this and learn something new about this era - everything about the blurb and the cover (yes, I judged) had me sold. Ethiopia is seldom written about and fiction from this era even lesser available to the masses which further confirms the Western bias in historical fiction/non-fiction.

Not quite the 1930s, but if you want an excellent story set in Ethiopia that you will love, I would wholly recommend Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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