Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

Above Us the Milky Way is a story about war, immigration, and the remarkable human capacity to create beauty out of horror. As a young family attempts to reconstruct their lives in a new and peaceful country, they are daily drawn back to the first land through remembrance and longing, by news of the continued suffering and loss of loved ones, and by the war dead, who have immigrated and reside with them, haunting their days and illuminating the small joys and wonders offered them by the new land.

The novel's structure is built around the alphabet, twenty-six pieces written in the first person that sketch a through-line of memory for the lives of the five daughters, mother, and father. Ghost stories and fairytales are woven with old family photographs and medieval-style watercolor illuminations to create an origin story of loss and remembrance.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, War, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Contemporary, United States

440 pages, Hardcover

First published April 7, 2020

About the author

Fowzia Karimi was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up in Southern California. She emigrated to United States in 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Karimi has a background in Visual Arts and Biology. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College in Oakland, California. Her work explores the correspondence on the page between the written and the visual arts. She is a recipient of The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and has illustrated The Brick House by Micheline Aharonian Marcom (Awst Press) and Vagrants and Uncommon Visitors by A. Kendra Greene (Anomalous Press). She lives in Texas.

Reviews

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Deep Vellum's newest titles offers a unique glimpse at modern wartime memories, encapsulated in pastiches of interwoven fragments. Karimi's family story is infused with heartfelt joy and much struggle and sorrow. The balance between life's ups and downs proceeds like an electrocardiogram's erratic wave in the tense blips of understanding and dawning horror.

Subtitled: An Illuminated Alphabet, the form of words, the importance of language, and the structural constraints of the alphabet offer focus to the child-centric perspectives, and the varied portrayal of innocence, its loss, and its stalwart preservation in the face of adversity.

The author constructs a deceptively simple organized system constituting lives, facilitating communication, and preserving stories within stories like moments fossilized in amber.

Rife with imagination, wonder and stark moments of real distress in a human wilderness fraught with terrors all-too-recognizable, Above Us the Milky Way magnifies the facets of humanity which are all too easy to miss as it threads through constellations of glistening imagery, suspended in pristine clarity, like drifting memories, colliding and rising to the surface of a collective pool.

The alphabet is a "way forward," she claims, our constituent particles roped together through language and the bonds within our DNA, which are letters themselves. Combining diary-like segments, "dirges" and "fairy tales" highlight her themes effortlessly. Add to this the plethora of moving family photographs and symbolic illustrations, and you get a kinetic, unpredictable, and ultimately astounding journey through patched-up existences in a faltering world.

The language is rich with figurative representation, even as unadorned reality intrudes upon elegiacal kingdoms of dream.

The central family of the novel bears the burden of wartime conditions while striving to safeguard its unit, its cohesion as one entity. Amid the torment of conflict true human spirit arises to strengthen our affinities.

The vivid, atmospheric details contribute even more to the moving experience of reading this remarkable debut. The prose flows like a deluge of well-honed knives, in pointed, glowing pulses, grows out of the star-specked soil of the author's illuminated mind. Each sentence poses like an ornate origami rose, revealing spectral poetry in angles and inlets of implication and idea.

I was enchanted by this tapestry of woe. But it also resurrected in me the easily buried hope that futures and dreams still live, that people still push onward, through chaos and misery, and in the tangled brambles of our lives, thorn-pricked, we can step forth into the light of peace.

Thanks go to Deep Vellum who provided an ARC through Edelweiss.

[Jola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will you think it is strange if I confess
that I have a deep
sense of myself as
something like an
astronaut, floating weightlessly out in space,
high above our tender earth,
there to do naught but marvel
at the absolute beauty of the stars.
Sometimes, I feel that it is the thing I was born
to do: love the sky
with all of my being.
And if my eyes, naked
and unblinking fixed themselves upon
the stars for a thousand years, it would not
be long enough to quench their thirst. How
beautiful they are. How absolutely and
fundamentally beautiful.

Thinking of it now, color was gone long before.
Where was it during those strange, silent months
before the armies began lining the streets, filling
the squares, entering the houses? It was as though
color had divined our lot, drawing the information
out of the solid ground or the trembling air, and
had simply faded, slowly leaching from road signs,
mittens, and potted flowers. It was if color, long
friendly with our people, could not remain to be
witness to what would soon befall us.

The sisters remembering
know that time does not
stand still, but neither
does it travel in a straight direction. It is many legged.
It rushes past, it scuttles back, it spins in circles.
It finds the openings and passes through them.
It is there, it is there, and it is here. At once, simultaneously.
So our earth reels.
So our galaxy hurtles through the vast deep. So.

the interior
My story was born and brewed in the internal; it will not follow the form or the logic of one shaped in the external. I cannot give you the arc you desire; if you seek biography, look elsewhere. It is a dream I offer you.

I say I am an astronaut. I say I here to do naught but gaze upon the stars. And even as I fathom the luminous lights above, I sense the wholesome water within. It rises and falls, it fills and buoys me. If my eyes were not firm and not coated with the liquid, what use would they be to the sky? And I think it is they, the ancient glimmering stars, who call water up and bind it to their own salt, so that they might see themselves amplified in my eyes.

MO VAB LE
The movable type, like numbers, endlessly transform,
arrange, and rearrange to tell ever new,
ever different tales. And they are playful,
they are players, even donning new faces, new forms.
See the letters of the alphabet say, we are letters,
we are numbers, we are fixed, we are movable,
have always been so. And the sisters too are movable, changeable. They shrink and grow, they are one,
then they are five, then they are 26, then 1000!
The playful sisters move here, move there,
climb into trees, travel underground,
into and out of the past, into and back from the distant future, into and out of one another, any other, anywhere.

In th e l and o f t he s un: and thought the family held back, its members each existing with one foot, one ear, two chambers of their hearts in each of the two lands, father nevertheless planted the seeds he had snuck into the new country in the ready soil of their small suburban yard. And up rose proud leeks, poppies, and tulips, while carrots and turnips nestled in the warm earth, and mint eagerly crawled over it in many directions. Here was earth, here was the sun, and both were wondrous and giving in the new land. They lived two lives on two continents simultaneously, in a present-that-is and a in a past-that-might-have-been. It was strange to arrive in a peaceful land, to share a classroom and a schoolyard with children who still had their innocence and peered out through a single pair of eyes: for our lids opened and closed as theirs did, but revealed intermittently different sets of eyes. We could stand at once in a desolate cityscape surrounded by tanks and headstones, and on a school playground filled with the din of laughter and bouncing balls, skipping children.

The grandfather tree.The sisters
agree the grandfather

tree is a tree;
he does not move
as they move;
he had no legs, no feet.
He has only his trunk and
numerous arms, those
that reach skyward
and love the radiant
sun and collect
nourishment from it
and splay their many broad
leaves like a thousand
open hands
giving thanks
to that distant orb,
and those that forever
reach earthward with
their many fine
filament-like fingers
that love cold dark places,
the wet-mineral places,
the secret-giving places.

They listen to the old tree’s
stories and though them
know him and find
he is more kin than
blood-kin. The
mechanism that
generates the earth-dreams
is the same one
that orchestrates
the transport of
minerals on the
backs of water molecules.
And it is the sun
and his sibling stars
who rejuvenate
the ancient tales
in their churning centers,
drawing them out
and sending them
on their way as
sky-dreams
across the
limitless cold spaces.

The grandfather tree’s first story is also
the earth’s first dream and it is the
dream of water. The great tree will
tell again the tale of water, of its pooling, its trickling and meandering through the labyrinthine channels within the rocky earth.
It will next tell of water’s murmur
and caress, its push and fall,
its great roar across the open
terrain of that same earth, giving shape to its many surfaces. And finally, it will tell of water’s absolute need to travel also in the
ascendant direction, against the force of
gravity, in order to find its destiny in the sky.
They will listen to the tree’s earth-dreams
and feel it within their own bodies, a body governed by the same forces, the same desire to travel in the skyward
direction, to find its own portrait
drawn with lines and points
across the dome of light.

J o y . and we had it in abundance!
It made the brightest scenes more vivid, and bloomed even in the darkest corners.
It was something to cultivate while we turned our eyes away from what besieged us. We were never without the war.
Joy, a precious thing,
a thing to procure at every turn, to draw from
the most modest of sources. She spent her days hungering after wholeness, gathering all she could draw to herself: rose petals and snail shells, paper-white or colored, blank or covered in the letters of the alphabet; mother’s broken jewelry… invisible to t he others, and mindful and what feeds the grass and the trees, she went o ut daily to draw the sun into her. But un impressed with its minuscule size in the infinite spaces within her chest, she searched farther out and farther on in the sky for more and ever greater stars. And there, she glimpsed the edge of things; the falling away of stars, the disappearance of galaxies entire.

K a L e i d o s C o p e. and this Book is one. See the liTtle movable piECEs, watch the briGht colors Arrange and Rearrange to tell ever new, eVer different tales, did I nOt say you can enter, turn, and retURn as you like?

She dreams of birds, though in her dreams
they arrive with longer tails, taller crests
and brighter plumage than any bird
in her neighborhood or her schoolbooks.
In her dreams, birds of myriad shapes
and colors congregate in the
grandfather tree or in the sycamore
on the front lawn. They arrive from corners
of the dream realm for occasions she clearly
senses are important, epochal even, but the
purpose of which she cannot fathom.

A R D O R- the sea
The sea loving sister sits at her school desk and draws and colors a scene she knows well- it is a picture of the ocean. She is drawn to the ocean by a force she cannot deny or explain. It is an old attraction. She felt the pull and dreamed of it long before leaving her landlocked birth country,

Above us the Milky Way,
So resplendent that
I can write this
By its light.

The sisters knew honeysuckle and jasmine, but the scents of these flowers never belonged to them, they were always of a different and distant past, which belonged to Mother’s stories, or were locked away in Father’s far-off gaze. And these scents, thought they wafted in through the living room windows, did not belong to the present because the memory of things weighed more than their experience.

Because it knew the girls’ thirst for color was great, the giving sun by turns separated then stacked its light to color the many flowers, fruits, leaves, birds, and insects before their eyes. It made the girls intimate with and sympathetic to all that was not human yet still breathed, writhed, quivered. And in summer, the unblinking sun saw all that the girls were and were not, in the world, among each other, and unto themselves.

O P E N. And Mother’s heart was big. It was deep. It was soft, warm, pulsing, bright. Open. Like her front door, her heart was always open to woman, child, man, friend, neighbor, guest, ghost, god, infidel, immigrant, vagrant, stray, invalid, sufferer, dreamer: being, living, or dead; being, real or imagined. Mother’s heart was big, its interiors vast and limitless. And the girls were once within and without it. Her great heart was the universe they inhabited. Everywhere they turned, there was Mother’s heart, stretched far and wide across the dome of the sky, smiling down on them, illuminating their tender emotions.

V O YA GE. The stars and the planets went tumbling through the cold dark spaces, unknowing, unmoored, until caught by this or that force. What tugged the family- mother, father, the sisters each- this way and that way? Here is a job. On the library shelf, a book. This is your friend. Around the next corner, a wonder awaits you. What guided each: the nose, the heart, a whim? The planets themselves sail without oars and without charts. The family too sail with the giddy winds.
The earth has shared a minute but generous fraction of its existence with humans, who are born of it, slip out from its hot crevices, and almost immediately leave the horizontal position to stand on two feet and gaze skyward. The human offspring inherits but one gesture from its progenitor, a gesture born of a single impulse: the need to find home.


Utterly beautiful and nonlinear and encompassing it all. Found poem above.

[Maxine · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her semi-autobiographical novel, Afghan-American author Fowzia Karimi uses a stylized alphabet to frame the story of a family - father, mother and five sisters after the 1980 invasion of Afghanistan by the Russians. The story constantly switches between before and after as the family manages to escape the terror that follows the invasion and make their way to California. The horrors of war are juxtaposed against the peaceful mundane life in the US broken only by the almost constant petty bickering between sisters. Although the family members are not named, each has their own tale and memories.

Above Us the Milky Way is a beautifully written and powerful story combining the horrors of war, the realities of immigration, family, and memory with fairy tales and word play and interspersed with coloured photographs of the family. It is uncompromising in its portrayal of war and engrossing in its portrayal of family life.This is a stunning book like nothing I have ever read before and I recommend it highly.

Thanks to Edelweiss+ And Deep Vellum Publishing for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir in prose poetry, a work of art, un objet d'art: one must read slowly both because of the poetic nature of this book but also because of the atrocities described. Beauty and horror (with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) coexist. The world within these pages is both the new land (California) and the first land (Afghanistan).
"My story was born and brewed in the internal; it will not follow the form or logic of one shaped in the external. I cannot give you the arc your desire; if you seek biography, look elsewhere. It is a dream I offer you."
As warned, if you are looking for a consistent narrative arc, look elsewhere. If you can slow down to immerse yourself in this highly original book, you'll be rewarded with the poetry, tales, dreams of this family and these lands as they clash, shift, reverberate, and collide.

[Sabrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the most unique book I’ve ever read. Dreamy, morbid, beautiful. Exists in its own world. 🧿

[Linden · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unconventional book which seems to be semi-autobiographical. It's the story of five daughters and a mother and father, all un-named. The book flows back and forth between their first land, Afghanistan; and their second land, California. They were forced to flee war, and the many losses of their relatives and friends haunt them, and are graphically described. That being said, the writing is very beautiful and the book is filled with photographs and illustrations.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, heartbreaking novel, that felt very real and almost autobiographical. It was told in the format of an encyclopedia, with an overarching word for each of the chapters/stories, but still with a story flowing throughout (though sometimes this story, and that section's word for that matter, was hard to pick out and connect). I absolutely loved this book. It was not an easy read, I will say- it was a slow sort of read (but I like that, I can savor it this way, this isn't a negative for me), there were violent depictions (just the very real reality for the country and the times- it can just be hard to stomach these things), and the alphabetic format (which I happen to LOVE when I see it and will always pick up and read) was not always easy to keep up with, though even that was still a cool format and a way forward as the author/narrator put it, a way to make sense of and emerge from the brutal world shared in the novel. Even so- I would absolutely recommend this book. Every time I see it at the library, I want to put it in somebody's hands. It has to be the right reader though. Still, it really was a beautiful read and I wanted to immediately read/buy more books from this independent publishing company just to support more writers like this. This was an important story in so many ways. I almost want to reread it, and I never want to do that. Just beautifully written. It is a book that stayed with me for so long.

[Kristin Kessinger]

“Will you think it strange if I confess that I have a deep sense of myself as something like an astronaut, floating weightlessly out in space, high above our tender earth, there to do naught but marvel at the absolute beauty of the stars. Sometimes, I feel that it is the thing I was born to do: love the sky with all of my being. And if my eyes, naked and unblinking, fixed themselves upon the stars for a thousand years, it would not be long enough to quench their thirst. How beautiful they are. How absolutely and fundamentally beautiful.”

I bought this book several years ago in Deep Ellum at @deepvellumbooks on a girls trip to Dallas with a couple of close friends. I’m happy I picked it up. Hauntingly beautiful and purposefully redundant, it evocatively captures the physically and emotionally destructive experience of war and diaspora. It illuminates how immigration encompasses both the pain of the past and the hope for a better future. Definitely recommend.

[RoseMary Achey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is physically gorgeous-the illustrations, photographs, cover and paper quality. The writing is similarly beautiful-there are many poetic passages throughout this semi-autobiographical novel...however, I failed to get into a rhythm with the author’s writing style.

[alli · Rating 5 out of 5]

so so beautiful. i didn't expect to love the format of this book as much as i did, but truly an amazing examination of family and connection and words and how they all intertwine. highly recommend!

fav quote: “their stories were somehow my own, or rather, mine was theirs repeated, i knew the roads they had traveled; i had traveled them too.”

[Fen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Above Us the Milky Way is a rare sort of book, intensely personal and resistant to any conventional classification. Perhaps most accurately described as a semiautobiographical novel, it follows a family which flees Afghanistan when the country is torn apart by war. Yet anyone looking for a typical novel will be sorely disappointed. A patient reader who enjoys unconventional works, however, will be rewarded.

Fowzia Karimi utilizes a stream-of-consciousness technique with focus on imagery in constructing her "alphabet"; each word is really a jumping-off point for her ruminations on childhood and war. It's a bit reminiscent of Proust, but Karimi eschews all linearity, and intersperses shorter blocks of text and images. People, particularly Westerners, love storytelling that fits into boxes, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, but there is no such structure to war, and there is none in this book.

Karimi's most memorable passages concern metaphor; for instance, she describes the sisters who have moved to the U.S. seeing their counterparts back in Afghanistan in the bathroom mirror, but the longer they are apart, the less they have in common. There are entire passages about rivers or castles, dreamscapes of sorts that represent the characters' internal states as they navigate life in a new land while knowing the horrors back at home. She also interweaves folk tales, whose themes arise again and again, such as the story of the jackal and the dog, and vignettes of life in Afghanistan, before and during war. Of course, no metaphor is stronger than the central one, in which Karimi describes herself and her people as movable like the type--they move from one country to another, from one continent to another, re-arranging themselves to find new meaning every time.

I can't say this is a flawless novel; it is human and flawed as the subject matter it portrays. Karimi herself notes this occasionally in meta-narration. Near the end of the book, she says she has been writing for nine years and repeated herself over and over in that time. But what is war, if not lengthy and repetitive, often with no rhyme or reason? I can't help but admit I sometimes tired of the repetition, and some passages are written in a saccharine manner I find offputting. However, those are small flaws in this otherwise fine book.

[Jeffrey Mervosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seven members of a family - 5 daughters and 2 parents - urgently flee Afghanistan (left nameless, just like all of the men and women who haunt these pages) for the United States. The five young girls face growing up in a new and foreign place that offers the opportunity for joy and comfort all while receiving terrible news about the horrors that befall those they left behind. Many of these bulletins from “the other place” are horrifically violent, sullying the innocence of childhood even from afar.

Roughly halfway through Above Us The Milky Way, Fowzia Karimi writes that “[i]t is in the internal that this story was born and that it took on its form. It follows the laws of that place, where everything happens simultaneously, and an entire childhood spans a single day.” Loosely based on the life of the author, this debut novel shuns linear narrative and adopts the characters of the alphabet for structure, orienting each of its 26 chapters on a word or concept that fits and using images to punctuate the vivid descriptions on the page.

This is an approach I haven’t encountered in prose before, but it brings to mind the films of Terence Malick, who frequently abandons chronological sequencing in favor of the fleeting and hazy wanderings of memory. In so doing, movies like Tree of Life convey the formative moments of an entire childhood in an afternoon. Like Malick, Karimi uses naturalistic touchpoints with great frequency - there are recurring references to stars, earth, flowers that serve as signposts for navigating disparate impressions from youth. Karimi takes this one step further by using the alphabet as a key, which does not hold up in my view. By the fifth or sixth chapter it begins to feel forced, with frequent flips back to the chapter’s introduction for reminders of what object or theme is supposedly central to that chapter’s reflections.

The author breaks the literary wall to address he reader directly on several occasions, offering apology for the scattered and perhaps unnecessarily difficult structure of the novel. “My story was born and brewed in the internal; it will not follow the form or the logic of one shaped in the external. I cannot give you the arc you desire; if you seek biography, look elsewhere. It is a dream I offer you.” While I do admire the courage of putting such an intimate dream to words, I admittedly found myself agreeing with the author by book’s end that something about the mode of storytelling did not work for me.

[Sheelie Kittee · Rating 4 out of 5]

The concept was so creative and the illustrations were lovely. But I am giving it 4 stars because it was still too dismantled, a bit too fragmented ( even yes, for someone like me who adores post-modern magical realism and such ) It was hard to follow at times, hard to piece together what was imagery and what was reality according to the author who herself wrote this as a form of memoir / autobiography but the concept of memory and what was / is real, not real, it made it difficult to follow.

So what I liked most about it were these phrases and glimpses of thoughts, aphorisms that leapt out from the page unexpectedly and then lingered with me thereafter, here I will share some of my favourites. I stil think it is absolutely worth reading and maybe you, fellow bibliophile, will find it differently from me, you may have a far easier time reading and perceive it to have more fluidity than I did.

_____________________________________________________

And war, on entering, obliterated everything and all. War shattered, severed, distorted, erased, violated, obliterated life, great and small, harmony, feeling, wonder.

What was a flower to war, a child - a culture - a melody - a river, a pcnic, a ritual, a statue, a fairy tale, a people, a memory, to war?

But they were sisters, and not paper dolls, so they swapped beds and partners seasonally to accomodate moods, dispositions, and alliances, which formed or fissured overnight.

She sensed that she ran on, was one of those numbers that futilely resists infinity: a number that is but is not because it fails all attempts at wholeness.

And each girl was a universe unto herself, a churning loss - consuming - life - begetting - tenderness system. and did she not fold / unfold like the great spiral galaxy itself?

The memory of things weighed more than their experience. The weight of a single memory is greater than the weight of all objects within view in any present moment, yet still they wished for time to linger.

If my eyes fixed themselves upon the stars for a thousand years, it would not be long enough to quench their thirst. How beautiful they are, how absolutely and fundamentally beautiful.

The Milky Way, illuminating the darkness above, travels across the dome of the sky in a continuous stream, beautiful.

[Lacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I'm glad I took my time and did not rush to finish when I put it aside a few months back. Here's a glimpse of what's inside its beautiful pages...

in the beginning: tea
Dear reader, it is early. We have not left the old land yet. Pull off your shoes, lean back into the cushions. I have poured you a cup. Stay awhile and read with me. Or, if you'd prefer, I can read you it in these leaves.

Enter and Exit
as you like, dear reader.

not-home
And like the displaced jackal who inhabits the borderlands, the sisters will never return home. If the doors to their birth country should open and the sisters file again onto a plane, lift and land, life and land to reach and enter that country, they will not have reached home, because the doors once closed, the curtains once drawn, never open upon the same scene again.

Vowels. Such a small handful of them, and yet they do what no consonant would dare, or could, do. They are openings. To what, you ask? Openings. They are like your eyes, your nostrils, your mouth, the orifices leading into and out of your body, which let in and let out the world. How far have you traveled into the interior? How far do you dare? What are you willing to ingest? Take a vowel. Take two.

so, life
...
So Mother says to her girls: Life you cannot unravel it. It is not the ball of yarn, not the braid on your head, not the living room rug. It grows in on itself, coils, collects, flourishes, fuels, warps, rasps, bleeds, brims, pulses, and empties; it enters even as it exits, sighs even as it howls, bruises even as it sweetens. This. This is life.

[Emily Allene · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, rounded down. This book was beautiful and poetic. This is a semi- autobiographical tale where the author, Karimi contrasts her new life in the US with her family and others who remained in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in '79. It tells of war through the eyes of children, and through the life of those who were fortunate enough to leave.

Early on in the book, I was captured by the beauty and the wisdom captured. "Life, you cannot unravel it. It is not the ball of yarn, not the braid on your head, not the living room rug. It grows on itself, coils, collects, flourishes, fuels, warps, rasps, bleeds, brims, pulses and empties; it enters even as it exists, sighs even as it howls, bruises even as it sweetens. This. This is Life."

But ultimately, my thoughts are best described by this passage from pg. 383
"If you, my constant reader, are sapped by this wearisome method of telling, take pity on me who, at a very great loss of time, had to work through at least a thousand repetitions of it, not to mention the anguish involved in writing with the dead at my side, over my shoulder; nor will you be surprised to know that by now the ninth year is nearly past since I took on the task."

My only wish for this book is that it were 100 pages shorter. Towards the middle/end I started to feel as though the sections were overly repetitive, and I was reading the same paragraphs multiple times.

I'm glad I read this book, I'm sad that I got to a point where I wanted it just to be over.

[Gabrielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book took me a long time to work through. If you’re one for poetry and deeply embedded metaphors then this is for you. To me, it felt like I was reading someone’s diary or morning pages (ie word vomit). I mean this partly in a good way— it was intimate and authentic, and also in a bad way— I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about much of the time. It’s gorgeous prose that you can read and enjoy the sound of whilst simultaneously zoning out and realizing at the end of it that you’ve no idea what you just read but it sounded really good.

It *sort of* tells the story of the author and her four sisters and her parents, after immigrating as refugees to Southern California to escape the violence in Afghanistan. It’s a poetic and illustrated account of the child’s perspective — to have left a country out of necessity but in which your family and friends still reside. While the five sisters have a pleasant life in the US, they are haunted by the deaths of those they left behind and the never ending war of their home country — even if they themselves were not necessarily there to experience these horrors. Their parents protected them by taking them away at young ages; their memories are still mostly warm for their first home. However they experience first hand rather their parents hearts being repeatedly crushed by any news they receive from home and the guilt that comes with surviving and even flourishing in their second country.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Above Us the Milky Way" by Fowzia Karimi is like no other book I’ve ever read—and I mean that in the best sense! It combines elements of familiar forms—coming-of-age story, family scrapbook, political history, elegy, belles-lettres, and visually stunning fine art—but it’s all woven together so magically that it reads almost like a fairy tale or like life as experienced during dream consciousness.

The prose itself is so exquisite that I savored each word as long as I could—like a delicious meal that I wanted to stretch out so I could keep enjoying it. Even the descriptions of brutality (and, faint-hearted readers beware, there are many) are rendered with such reverence that I couldn’t look away.

If you’re only interested in straightforward stories full of timeworn tropes presented in familiar ways, this probably isn’t the book for you. However, if you’re open to something different—a stunning work of art that is truly original—you may find this to be one of the most extraordinary books you’ll ever come across.

A powerfully moving reading experience from beginning to end—highly recommended!

[blue · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can honestly say Above Us the Milky Way is one of the best pieces of literature I’ve ever read. After a lifetime of absorbing, recording, and observing with all senses, Karimi shares richly descriptive tales of a family transplanted from their war-torn homeland to a strange new land of sun and peace. Internally though, they continue to exist in both worlds simultaneously. This collection of beautifully curated stories embraces childhood, memory, truth, joy, terror, but most acutely, LOVE. Love for nature, family, biology, books, the dead, and the stars.
Her level of craft is exceptional - distilled, composed, and organized, and at the same time playful, free, and poetic. The text is accompanied by family photos and stunning original watercolors that illuminate and elevate the storytelling in a way that neither word nor image could do alone.
I read it slowly, and savored the complex tapestry that Karimi masterfully weaves - the interconnectedness of micro and macro, the family and the cosmos.
I can’t wait to read it again…highly recommended!!!

[Laura Valdes Jost · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a poem. I could tell right away that it wouldn’t do to read it like a book. So I decided I would read two letters a day and let them wash over me until the next read. I found it to be beautifully written and easy to melt into the rhythm of the words. When I did read more than two letters, it felt a disservice. To make something this beautiful for all it’s darkness is a feat.

It is very intense. To revisit such stark, perverted violence over and over is jarring in and amidst whimsical words about sisterhood/childhood. But it does give you the sense of what it must have been like to await violence at every turn, never knowing when it would strike while you try to live your life. This book is a picture of innocence, the gross realities of war, girl/womanhood, love of a place that is more than one thing, family, immigration, and the complicated experience of being a human.

I appreciated it very much and this book will stick with me for a lifetime.

[K.C. Norton · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5⭐️

This book is unlike any I’ve read before: part memoir, part novel, part prose-poem, it has shifting, dreamy quality that I foubd fascinating. While I did sometimes felt that it strayed off-course, this is the kind of book that I can absolutely imagine reading again in two or three years and getting something else entirely out of the experience.

By employing this style, Karimi takes the reader to moments that are imagined or reconstructucted from the stories of family members. There are actual dream sequences employed to convey the surreal experience of being a relatively happy child while also being aware of the horrors of a war left behind. The book is less concerned with fact than feeling, which made it a tough read, and I had to nibble it in chunks. It took me several weeks to get through this one, but it’s written to be consumed in that way. I know the writing style won’t work for some readers, but I found it very visceral and pathos-heavy.

[Greg Fletcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was certainly different than anything I've read. The layout of the book is extremely interesting and beautiful. At first I didn't know whether I liked the book or not. As the story line was revealed I found myself somewhat captivated and curious. She never stated "where" she was from. She never stated what war was being fought, or exactly who was fighting who.(maybe in the end) But what was evident was that her family and many others suffered the heinous impact of the war from both warring parties. Seeing and knowing of unspeakable crimes. Atrocities that normal people would never believe a human being would be capable of committing. And then there were the memories of those left behind combined with the guilt of having escaped. I believe this is a great read. I plan to read it again in case I missed something.

[Misty Kupka · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed savoring this beautiful book slowly. It is a work of art in so many ways. It is a family history, a war story, a story of emigration and immigration, an adventure, a love story about the mystery of language & memory, a tale of grief & loss, the magic of childhood, resiliency in the face of inter-generational trauma and the journey to start over in a strange landscape. It is an imaginative and creative memoir that is both personal and universal in the various ways it illuminates how our shared humanity connects us...Above Us the Milky Way.

[Lynn Domina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a highly unusual book, labeled as a novel, though I suspect it is more of an experimental memoir. The voice is compelling. The book is structured into 26 sections, one for each letter of the alphabet, with each section divided into several short vignettes. They're reflective more than narrative-driven, though there is an implied narrative. The story revolves around an Afghani refugee family and focuses primarily upon five sisters. One of the best books I've read this year.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

An abecedarian book made up of vignettes following a family after their immigration from Afghanistan to California - five daughters and two parents. Truly one of the most unique things I’ve ever read. The prose is like poetry. There is an air of hopefulness for the future of the family as well as an air of loss for what they have left behind. Some incredibly beautiful passages and some incredibly heart wrenching passages. The kind of book that you should take slow and savor as you read.

[Jeannine Perez · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book, i was excited, but this just wasn't for me. There was too much going on in between the story, and it didn't allow me to get into the story line and what the book was about. This is my first time writing a not so great review. I can't write a book, so much respect to these authors that put their work out there. I am positive this book was great for others, just not something i was personally able to connect with and follow.

[Fred Pierre · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot of beauty to this novel, and the style is unique, to say the least. The story is presented as an alphabet reader, with photos and graphics and an attractive design. I couldn't connect with the narrative, although it has love, pathos, drama and war. I feel like the format restricted the storytelling. It's a beautiful book, but a difficult read.

[Conner Horak-Flood · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read half of it and it's gorgeous, like a waterfall in slow motion. But it is slow and through a series of events, I won't be finishing it. But I feel comfortable recommending to anyone who sees books, not only as stories, but as fine art through the prose, narrative, the physical pages smeared with ink, and the cloth- ironed covers that bind them together. *chef's kiss*

[Fnouristani · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book.. it's our story, but I felt it was more of a writing project a play of words, an intellectual exercise... it kept losing me and I couldn't finish it..but author is an excellent writer I just wish it was more relatable.

[Noelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book. There are no words really to write about this book. It is clever and beautiful and oh so sad. I cried so much reading this book it’s a heart breaker. How war affects people especially children and how the survivors survive.