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As his twenty-sixth birthday approaches, Desta Joy Walker finds himself in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the one place he’s been actively avoiding most of his life. For Desta, the East African capital encompasses some of the happiest and saddest parts of his life–his first home and the place where his father died. When an unavoidable work obligation lands him there for twelve weeks, he may finally have a chance for the closure he so desperately needs. What Desta never expected was to catch a glimpse of his future as he reconnects with the beautiful country and his family’s past.
Elias Fikru has never met an opportunity he hasn’t seized. Except, of course, for the life-changing one he’s stubbornly ignored for the past nine months. He’d be a fool not to accept the chance to pursue his doctoral studies in the U.S., but saying yes means leaving his homeland, and Elias isn’t ready to make that commitment.
Meeting Desta, the Dominican-American emergency relief worker with the easy smile and sad eyes, makes Elias want things he’s never envisioned for himself. Rediscovering his country through Desta’s eyes emboldens Elias to reach for a future where he can be open about every part of himself. But when something threatens the future that’s within their grasp, Elias and Desta must put it all on the line for love.
Review:
Finding Joy is so many things – a recognition of the longing for the places we call home, a gentle love story between two people who are a little lost and searching for a path to the future, and a beautiful love letter to Ethiopia as it is, not as a caricature of the Western imagination. It also depicts both the universality and the infinite variety of the immigrant experience. Books like these are never more important than they are now, when forces on all sides strive to rigidly define the experience of entire groups of people into digestible, homogeneous little narratives.
Desta leaves Washington DC for a job with AID USA to escape a bad break up and come to terms with what he needs to be satisfied in his life. Ethiopia is particularly poignant for him. He spent the first three years of his life there with his parents, a time described as the happiest they’d ever been, but it is also the country where his father died.
Elias is part of the local staff for the humanitarian organization and works as driver, translator and manager of logistics as Desta and the aid team make their way around the country. Elias is pure light – happy, wise and full of the kind of energy Desta desperately needs. He is also gay in a country where living openly as a gay man is socially taboo and illegal.
With all the discussions about who is allowed to tell certain stories, Herrera’s work is a refreshing burst of empathy and talent. She treats her subjects with respect, infusing her stories with a powerful love and admiration for the human condition in any way it comes. She addresses the big questions – colonialism, bi-culturalism, grief, homophobia, and microagressions – with seriousness without drowning out the romance. She doesn’t shy away from the physicality of love, either, as demonstrated in intensely passionate love scenes in the novel. And Desta kind of hints at his desire for Elias through a shared listening of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe which excuse me, is pretty freaking amazing. These touches of humanity and sensitive understandings have made Herrera an auto buy author for me.
“Desta” means “joy” and this story, as all Herrera’s stories, are a testament to the universal joy of love, a right that belongs to everyone, in every iteration that it appears.
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