Dream Country by Shannon Gibney (review)

The introductory story set in 2008 follows Kollie, a Liberian refugee teenager with memories of his homeland gripped by war and Ghanaian refugee camps. He's justifiably frustrated in his new home in Brooklyn Center, MN, where his Black American peers make it clear he's unwelcome and his parents, after he gets suspended for fighting, essentially do the same by sending him back to Liberia. In the 1920s, Kollie's great-grandfather is attempting to flee from a militia in the Liberian bush before eventually being caught and made to work for the Congo people, descendants of the American attempt to colonize Liberia with freed slaves in the 19th century. The next section follows Yasmine's 1826 pilgrimage—along with her three young sons and her infant daughter—from a Virginia plantation to a new settlement in Monrovia, Liberia, and traces the resentment Yasmine develops toward the African continent and its peoples, which eventually pushes away her youngest child. At this point, the novel wraps around to explore Kollie's father in the 1980s, and although each story could exist on its own to great effect, the ways they inform one another are historically grand and intimately detailed. A final part acts effectively as an epilogue from Kollie's sister, who has been narrating all along and has pieced the disparate parts of her family's history together in the lead up to her own marriage to a African-American woman from Southside Chicago. She frames her race and queerness and family all within this story, and the solace she finds in love adds some clear perspective to a credibly messy history.