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The Girl Who Smiled Beads

A Story of War and What Comes After

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The Girl Who Smiled Beads

Written by: Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil
Narrated by: Robin Miles
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About this listen

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war and rape. I would not—could not—live in that tale.”

Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety—perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive.

When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, ultimately, graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old.

In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms.

©2018 Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil (P)2018 Random House Audio
Africa Social Sciences Women World Refugee
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What the critics say

"Sharp, moving... Wamariya and her co-author, Elizabeth Weil...describe Wamariya's idyllic early childhood in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, and the madness that followed with an analytic eye and, at times, a lyrical honesty.... Wamariya is piercing about her alienation in America and her effort to combat the perception that she is an exotic figure, to be pitied or dismissed.... Wamariya tells her own story with feeling, in vivid prose. She has remade herself, as she explains was necessary to do, on her own terms." (Alexis Okeowo, New York Times Book Review)

"Like Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, on being a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, or Joseph Kim’s Under the Same Sky, on escaping North Korea, The Girl Who Smiled Beads is at once terrifying and life-affirming. And like those memoirs, it painstakingly describes the human cost of war." (Washington Post)

“Remarkable.... Wamariya and the journalist Elizabeth Weil set out to sabotage facile uplift.... The fractured form of her own narrative - deftling toggling between her African and American odysseys - gives troubled memory its dark due.” (Ann Hulbert, The Atlantic)

  • Winner of the 2019 ALA/YALSA Alex Award
  • A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2018
  • A Glamour Best Book of 2018
  • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018
  • A Real Simple Best Book of 2018

What listeners say about The Girl Who Smiled Beads

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Thank you Clemantine

We are beyond thankful for your extreme bravery and courage in living out your story and then being willing to share it with others. It is heart wrenching and beautiful. A window into a life we could otherwise never even hope to have understanding for. May we be changed by hearing it.

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WOW!

what a view and perspective and emotion and... WOW!

take The time to listen. it's lovely

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A beautifully told story of survival

Joyful Clemantine is a beautiful storyteller, revealing the sadness, joy and confusion that accompanies surviving and transcending the refugee journey. Her story left a searing mark in my like few others have. A+

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Inspiring

Thank you for your vulnerability and willingness to share your story. Your strength and resilience are humbling.

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