THE DRAGONS, THE GIANT, THE WOMEN

A lyrical reckoning with the aftermath of civil war.

The first Liberian civil war was a disaster for the people of Liberia, including Moore and her family. Only 5 years old at the time, she was forced to flee her home on foot alongside her family as rebels advanced down her street, guns firing. After weeks of walking, they found relative safety in the village of Lai, near the border with Sierra Leone, where they would remain for seven months. When a rebel arrived in Lai promising to sneak Moore’s family into Sierra Leone, the author breaks the narrative, jumping ahead 25 years to the mid-2010s. At that time, she lived in Brooklyn, and things were not going well. She was stalled on a novel (perhaps her acclaimed 2018 book She Would Be King). Amid the racial tensions following the highly publicized deaths of black citizens at the hands of police officers, she broke up with her white boyfriend after he insulted her, and she was having nightmares and considering returning to Liberia for the first time since she was a girl. This section drags a bit, as Moore’s problems take on a developed-nation air, especially in light of the chapters that preceded them. But for the remainder of the book, the author confronts the legacy of the war for her family and her country, trying in particular to understand the rebel woman who led her surviving family to safety. As Moore conducts this investigation in earnest, she writes a long section of the text in the voice of her mother. It reads like fiction in the sense that the author’s inhabiting of her mother’s character is absolute. Nonfiction purists might balk at this liberty, but the resulting intimacy is profound. Here and throughout, Moore’s control of language is impressive.

Formally dazzling yet coolly reflective prose makes for a refined memoir.