A House in the Sky

I loved (most of...) this book and can't believe I hadn't read it earlier.

A Canadian woman set out to be a world adventurer preferring war-torn countries. When she ventured into Somalia with a friend she'd convinced to go with her, she had gone to one country too far. It would not be a spoiler to assume she survives her ordeal, as she had to write it, but it felt unlikely throughout the pages.

I would have liked to give this 3.5 stars. There was one piece missing at the end. It is hard to put a finger on it, but I think it was a personal growth I'd hoped she'd acknowledge. I found it hard to connect to the narrator at times.

Still, definitely worth reading.

Amanda Lindhout chose to have a co-writer for the book and found a kindred spirit in Sara Corbett who wasn't just interested in telling the harrowing story of her 15 months of captivity in Somalia. Instead we meet a young Amanda escaping her grim northern Alberta upbringing in the pages of National Geographic. A teenaged Amanda in South America finally visiting those places she'd only read about. A young 20-something globe-trotting Amanda chasing the next big story. Someone who spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan and finds herself in Mogadishu Somalia covering the stories that traditional news outlets weren't. Captured on the road she and her one time boyfriend and photographer are held for 1.5 million each. Amanda endures 15 months of torture, rape, beatings, starvation and more yet maintains her sanity and optimism throughout.

This could have been misery porn, an endless litany of things endured but Amanda infuses it with hope. It's a huge gut punch of a book made even more relevant knowing that one of the kidnappers has been arrested and is facing trial. Now years after her ordeal, Amanda is forced to relive her time in captivity reviewing the thousands of pages of debriefing documents recorded at the time of her release. Events she had buried and forgotten, even things she doesn't mention in the book itself. She exhibits such incredible strength in the pages of the book and continues to prove her fortitude even now.

This non-fiction story about the author's 15 month captivity is written with beautiful descriptions of the places she travelled and a matter-of-fact tone that makes her horrific experiences in captivity that much more horrifying. One of my favorite quotes from the book comes after the two captives, Amanda and Nigel, celebrate Christmas by creating gifts for one another with whatever was available and trading them through a bathroom they shared: “I loved him in that moment, on that day, more than I'd ever loved anyone, in a way that reached past the standard boy-girl love and hit some sort of deeper bedrock. I loved him as a human, with no complication.”

It took me awhile to get over the “What kind of idiot goes to Somalia?” attitude while reading this memoir, but I eventually accepted the reasoning that Amanda was not fortunate enough to have parents who told her things like, “Don't ever go to Somalia. You'll get abducted.” Also, it seems like she has more than turned her horrible hostage experience into a positive thing (she runs a foundation now).