When Enaiatollah Akbari was 10 years old, on the night his mother was forced to abandon him in Pakistan, she made him promise her three things: that he would never do drugs, never raise a weapon against another human being and never steal. The harrowing adventures that follow in this superb little novel are based on the true story Enaiat told to author Fabio Geda in Turin at the end of his perilous, five-year odyssey through Iran, Turkey and Greece, all the way to Italy.
The novel opens in Quetta, Pakistan, where his mother is forced to leave Enaiat in a crowded warehouse of people waiting for traffickers to help them emigrate. He and his mother fled their village when it fell under Taliban control. Enaiat's life-and-death adventures are narrated in a matter-of-fact, childlike way, without being cloying or sensational. He goes from working for a hostel keeper to braving the bazaar working for a shoe seller, and is rescued from a group of Pashtun boys who steal from him by a group of Hazara youths who become his allies and friends.
Determined to keep his three promises to his mother, young Enaiat manages to survive. He crosses treacherous mountains and endures a three-day journey packed with 50 other children into a truck bed's secret false bottom, sealed in total darkness. He's shuttled from crowded warehouses to underground garages jammed with illegals, chased by wild boars, and forced to cross the turbulent sea from Turkey to Greece with four other boys in a dinghy with a hole in it. He stows away on a Greek freighter for three days without food or water to arrive finally in Italy, the land where, at last, people treat him kindly. --Nick DiMartino, Nick’s Picks, University Book Store, Seattle