The Boat People

November 13, 2017
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.

May 1, 2018

In Canadian novelist Bala's debut, a 60-meter freighter reaches British Columbia in 2009, carrying 500 survivors of Sri Lanka's brutal civil war. The arrivals are herded into detention centers by a government fearful of terrorists hidden among these "boat people." Mahindran and his six-year-old son Sellian are among the asylum seekers assigned to legal counsel Priya Rajakaran, whose initially reluctant involvement inspires interest in her own family's Sri Lankan immigration. Adjudicator Grace Nakamura, whose grandparents and mother spent World War II imprisoned solely because of their Japanese ancestry, will determine Mahindran's future. Seamlessly navigating three separate backstories, Athena Karkanis proves herself a remarkable narrator, adeptly portraying the personalities of a sprawling cast, including Sellian's tantrums, Priya's uncle's confessions, Grace's mother's dementia-strangled demands, and many more. VERDICT Inspired by the real-life 2009-10 arrival of 550 Tamil refugees on two ships in British Columbia, Bala bestows unforgettable individual identities onto urgent headlines that Karkanis then embodies with exceptional fluency and ease. ["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": LJ 2/1/18 review of the Doubleday hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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