PLACE OF COOL WATERS

In this novel, an American orphan travels to Kenya and makes startling discoveries about his family pedigree.

Jude Wilson is abandoned as a baby and fortunately adopted by Tom and Doris. Jude is lovingly raised in Clarksville, Washington, a “placid, unassuming town.” His childhood is a happy, comfortable one, and he joins the Boy Scouts—his father is a scoutmaster—and learns to adore the outdoors. Despite being a Black youth in “lily-white Clarksville,” he’s largely untouched by the experience of racism and doesn’t seem particularly motivated to uncover his familial roots. But after Conor McKittrick, an old friend from high school, dies of cancer, Jude is inspired to seize the day and travel to Kenya to visit the graves of Lord Baden-Powell and Capt. Tom Wilson, both seminal figures in the history of the Boy Scouts. But Jude isn’t a worldly man—he’d never been on a plane before—and his naïveté makes him easy prey for criminal opportunists. In Kenya, he is drugged and robbed by a taxi driver and then arrested when he’s mistaken for a fugitive terrorist. But he meets a young man of Somalian descent, Qadir Mohamed, also an orphan, who might hold the key to unlocking the secrets of Jude’s lost past, a plot twist tenderly limned by Githaiga. The author is at his best depicting the experience of alienation: Qadir is doubly dislocated since his parents died when he was young, and as a Somalian, he routinely encounters prejudice in Nairobi. In addition, Githaiga has a keen eye for the ways in which an insidious brand of racism can exist beneath the surface of easily visible bigotry. Unfortunately, the plot ambles along at an unhurried pace. Moreover, the book’s obvious ending seems emotionally contrived, more formulaically cinematic than authentic.

An engaging but slow-paced tale about a man searching for his roots.