Does Guene's new novel, Some Dream for Fools, actually tell a story? Not really. It's more like a montage of rapid sketches in the life of 25-year-old Ahleme, fighting for survival in the housing project outside Paris called Insurrection. The narrative has a couple tenuous plot threads which give it a bit of an arc--including a brief romance with Tonislav, a mysterious, sexy stranger from Eastern Europe--but it's not plot that you read Guene for, and really, it's not her characters, either. It's her voice.
Her first novel, hilariously deadpan and touchingly vulnerable, was Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, narrated by blunt 13-year-old Doria from Morocco, fighting to survive in the Paradise housing projects just outside Paris and fighting to grow up at the same time. Doria's no-holds-barred take on life as an impoverished outsider marked Guene's astonishing debut at the age of 16.
Ahleme, the narrator of Some Dream for Fools, is 12 years older than Doria but fired up with the same spirit. Ever since her mother died and her family fled from Algeria, Ahleme has had her hands full living on a residency permit while taking care of her brain-injured father and trying to raise her little brother, Foued, who is now 16 and a little too interested in local teenage gang activity.
When she finds a shoebox under Foued's bed containing bundles of bills, you'll be just as aghast as her younger brother when he turns on the lights and finds her sitting in his dark bedroom, waiting for him. There's nothing halfway about Ahleme. She's got two fists and a mouth that knows no bounds. Though the odds are stacked against her, there's never any question of her going down without a fight.
Faiza Guene writes with so much confidence and in-your-face self-knowledge that the reader laughs all the way through this too-short novel, coming away from it saddened by the grim terms of an immigrant's life but experiencing a rather pleasant after-effect, a cocky little flare-up of feisty defiance.--Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: A tough, honest and defiant novel of Algerian life in a housing project near Paris by of the hottest new European authors writing today.