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Summary
Summary
When a rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees from Sri Lanka's bloody civil war reaches Vancouver's shores, the young father thinks he and his six-year-old son can finally start a new life. Instead, the group is thrown into a detention processing center, with government officials and news headlines speculating that among the "boat people" are members of a separatist militant organization responsible for countless suicide attacks-and that these terrorists now pose a threat to Canada's national security. As the refugees become subject to heavy interrogation, Mahindan begins to fear that a desperate act taken in Sri Lanka to fund their escape may now jeopardize his and his son's chance for asylum.
Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer, Priya, a second-generation Sri Lankan Canadian who reluctantly represents the refugees; and Grace, a third-generation Japanese Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan's fate as evidence mounts against him, The Boat People is a spellbinding and timely novel that provokes a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis.
Author Notes
Sharon Bala is a member of the Port Authority writing group and her short fiction has been published in several Canadian magazines. The Boat People is her debut novel.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A reckoning between Canada's historic ideals and its contemporary politics is forced in this timely and engrossing debut novel based on the arrival of 500 refugees from war-torn Sri Lanka in 2010. After a voyage aboard a ship "groaning under the weight of too much human cargo," Mahindan and his son land with their fellow fleeing Tamils near Vancouver, woefully unprepared for the trials that still await them. Grace has been appointed to arbitrate their fitness to enter the country by a politician who instructs her, "Canada has a reputation for being a soft touch.... We must disabuse the world of that notion." The government's attempt to cast the refugees as terrorists leads to protracted admissibility hearings, forcing Mahindan's son into foster care and dimming his dreams of freedom. Skillfully braiding Grace's and Mahindan's perspectives, Bala manages wrings drama from the endless bureaucratic delays that make up the story. Hope only arrives once Grace's mother begins sharing stories of their Japanese-Canadian family's internment during World War II, leading Grace to reassess the ruthless approach expected of her; conversely, Bala's gradual reveal of the nastiness Mahindan engaged in to escape Sri Lanka complicates his otherwise sympathetic portrayal. This is a powerful debut. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A real ship of refugees inspires a novel about the messy consequences of war.In 2010, Canadian authorities intercepted a rusty Thai freighter carrying 492 refugees from war-ravaged Sri Lanka, the teardrop-shaped island once called Ceylon, off the tip of India. The headlines inspired Bala to write and launch her first novel as books about migrants are at flood tide. This one toggles between Sri Lankan flashbacks and Vancouver, British Columbia, where the passengers come ashore, mistaking the helicopter and Canadian ships for a welcome party. Instead, they're all sent into detention, where many remain through these pages. Mahindan, a minority Tamil mechanic, and his small son are assigned to a well-meaning, alcoholic lawyer and his law student sidekick, Priya, a second-generation Sri Lankan-Canadian pining to do corporate work: "The pungent combination of chili powder, body odour, and urine that wafted ahead of them made Priya hold her breath," Bala writes. This is never a subtle book. It also features political appointee Grace Nakamura, a Japanese-Canadian adjudicator who, by the last page, has yet to rule on Mahindan's status. Grace's mother endured a World War II internment camp, setting up the elder woman's fixation on the property the family lost. Bala's writing is generally crisp, with occasional glints of humor. The short, unnumbered chapters march briskly; the dialogue lacks quotation marks. Each chapter heading"Go Home Terorists!" (the misspelling is intentional); "Welcome to Winter"; "Enemy Aliens"; "Judge, Jury, and Executioner"is plucked from the text. This first book has a workshopped feel as well as a few memorable passages: Mahindan's first encounter with a Western shower, the rhythms of a recycled family joke, a chilling scene of United Nations withdrawal. But compared to nuanced recent literature set amid Sri Lankan strifeOn Sal Mal Lane by Ru Freeman or The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasamthis is thin fare.A strong premise runs aground trying to form a set of convictions into a novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Mahindan came to Canada thinking he could make a fresh start for himself and his six-year-old son. Refugees from Sri Lanka, where the Tamil Tigers terrorist group battled the government to create an independent state, Mahindan and his son were among more than 500 immigrants who arrived on a cargo ship to seek asylum. But as the days turn into weeks and Mahindan is grilled in detention hearing after detention hearing, while being housed in jail, he begins to realize that your past can catch up to you, no matter how far you run. This earnest debut novel forcefully explores the issues surrounding immigration from the perspectives of three people: Mahindan; the second-generation Sri Lankan Canadian law student assigned to his case; and the adjudicator of Japanese descent, tasked with the cargo-ship cases, whose own family had lost their home during the internment in WWII. Deeply moving and nuanced, The Boat People asks what price a country is willing to pay when public safety comes at the cost of human lives.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Two pieces of Canadian history lie behind Sharon Bala's debut novel, "The Boat People." The first involves the arrival - in August 2010 - of the merchant vessel Sun Sea at Equimalt naval base in British Columbia, carrying hundreds of Sri Lankan asylum seekers. The second involves the internment of almost 24,000 Canadian citizens of Japanese origin in the Slocan Valley by the British Columbia Security Commission between 1941 and 1949. The arrival of the refugees is fictionalized through the voices of the widower Mahindan, a resourceful father rendered unscrupulous by the circumstances of a terrible war, who has arrived with his 6year-old son, Sellian, and Priya Rajasekaran, a law student assigned to represent the refugees. Grace Nakamura, an adjudicator for the Immigration and Refugee Board, provides the connection to 1941 through her mother, Kumi. The latter, her mind laced with dementia, sallies forth like a Greek chorus to insist that subjecting foreign asylum seekers to the processes established by rule of law is the same as the forced removal and incarceration of lawabiding citizens. It's a false equivalence that blights a novel already struggling under the weight of political opinion: Balas vilifies the Canadian Border Services Agency and the draconian immigration laws and penalties that can be traced to the prime minister at the time, Stephen Harper, and sings the praises of the Canadian Tamil Congress, an organization designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council that appears here as the Tamil Alliance. The "compassionate" lens promised on the jacket copy proves elusive. The novel is burdened by a heavy-handed use of emotive prose. Bala is particularly fond of the diminutive, the "small" of things, hands, wounded children - all designed to elicit sympathy. Stock characters crowd the narrative. One of them, Grace's worldweary colleague Mitchell Hurst, shows up no fewer than four times to make declarative statements about what a neophyte she is at this business of adjudicating asylum. Bala also labors to explain things that do not require explanation, from immigration law ("there can be a gap between policy and practice") to Border Services ("the agency responsible for patrolling the perimeter, the country's official boundaries"). Less than 10 pages into this novel, a lawyer says: "The truth is immaterial.... Do the claimants appear to be telling the truth? That is what matters." His words are echoed by Mahindan toward the end of the book: "What is important is not what is true or false. The important thing is what these people, the Canadian authorities, believe is true and false." It's an interesting premise that, if allowed to float, might have permitted the novel to reach safe harbor. Instead, Bala frog-marches readers toward a foregone conclusion: The government is vindictive; the refugees, innocent. The author plays with time through flashbacks told in the present tense, an innovative approach well suited to capturing the upside-down nature of refugee narratives. With a treasure trove of material - what can't a writer do with a boatload of refugees? - it is mystifying that Bala has chosen to ignore the obvious: letting us see the refugees as perfect in their imperfections rather than rendered as pawns in this political narrative, just as they were trapped in a war not of their choosing. There is one character, Mahindan's champion bargainer of a wife, Chithra, who in flashbacks lights up the page with her presence and prescience, the energy she brings to her marriage, her friendships and her pregnancy. One is left wishing Chithra had made it to Canada. Her youthful vitality and fierce personality would have helped the author dispense with a multitude of middling characters and political invective and given us a heroine worth cheering for. RU freeman is the author of the novels "A Disobedient Girl" and "On Sal Mal Lane," and the editor of "Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine."
Library Journal Review
DEBUT When a cargo ship loaded with several hundred refugees from war-torn Sri Lanka arrives in Vancouver, BC, both official and unofficial suspicion immediately arises. Might not potential terrorists be bringing their specific brand of violence to Canadian shores? As Canadian officials scramble to manage the crisis, debut author Bala capably establishes the interlocking narratives of three characters, each revealing a different, albeit compelling, perspective on the issues. Mahindan, one of the refugees, awaits judgment on his status while withstanding a prolonged separation from his six-year old son. Grace, whose Japanese grandparents endured both property forfeiture and internment during World War II, must sit in judgment of the "boat people" as adjudicator. Among her opponents is Priya, a young lawyer and second-generation Sri Lankan participating reluctantly in the proceedings. She represents the rights of refugees, though initially her heart had been set on establishing a career in corporate law. VERDICT By empathetically exploring each character's backstory, Bala presents the complex task of balancing a nation's desire to be compassionate with the need to identify threats to national security, providing a timely examination of the refugee crisis worldwide. Recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, 7/31/17.]-Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.