"How to Read the Air" by Dinaw Mengestu

305 pages

In the late 1970s, two young Ethiopian immigrants named Yosef and Mariam set off on a road trip from their new home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee. Thirty years later, their son Jonas retraces their steps immediately after losing his job and ending his marriage. He believes the trip will help him better understand his parents, with whom he has always had a strange relationship. The generational and cultural gaps between Jonas and his parents have always been huge, but he's recently realized that he can't figure out his own identity unless he knows where he comes from--meaning that he needs to understand his parents' experiences as immigrants in order to comprehend how their influence has shaped him.

I really wanted to like this book (I loved the author's first book, "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears") and I did enjoy parts of it. I liked how the two stories weave together and the mystery about what had actually happened on Jonas' parents' road trip. However, I felt like what DID happen was anticlimactic. The story as a whole just didn't have enough going on for me. The writing is beautiful and I think those who like super-literary fiction will enjoy it, but personally I usually get bored if there's not lots of stuff happening (I'm not sure what this says about me, but there it is). For me, this story was definitely worth reading but certainly not a favorite.