The Power of Rebuilding

I can distinctly remember hearing it, but I would not be able to pinpoint the "when" or "where."  The "who" is Robin Roberts, a journalist and cancer survivor.  What began (I think) as a comment in an interview became a mantra, as well as the title of her podcast and her book, Everybody's Got Something.

I just finished reading All American Boys, by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely and Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid.  The words of Robin Roberts resonate in my mind as these books, both about very different types of adversity do more than just deliver stories of trauma.  They are narrating the "what happens next," the rebuilding that defines the character after the trauma; in doing so, they explore how two people can be permanently linked by a common experience.  Two very different authors and very different novels, but the message they share is definitely noteworthy.

In All American Boys, Quinn witnesses an unjust incident of police brutality, and as the book progresses, he faces both the internal and external pull towards a reality from which he cannot escape.  Simultaneously, the authors present a shared narrator (the characters switch chapters), and the reader listens to Rashad, the young ROTC student turned into a hashtag almost overnight- Rashad is absent again today.  

In Exit West, this summer's One Book, One Region pick, two characters, Nadia and Saeed, find themselves rebuilding their lives after finding a series of "doors" that take them away from home, a city at war, to California, a place that seems to navigate its own new realities that make the location recognizable but not necessarily familiar to the reader.  Hamid's California does not quite feel like California now, but it does seem to suggest this is what California might soon become.


 All the authors bring the trauma to the story early, so that each novel is essentially a story of rebuilding, exploring what happens next while also delivering very sharply the power of human connection, the concept that "everybody's got something" and indeed, if we are to be part of a shared humanity, we need to start listening. 

Have you been reading about any characters that have a story of adversity and resilience?  Post some suggestions!