Book Reviews

Unrated | 225 pages | Henry Holt and Co| Literary Fiction | 3/13/18  

 The Parking Lot Attendant is this sort of unsettling literary novel about a teenage girl and her father living in Boston’s Ethiopian community. They are both introverted and reserved people who keep to themselves; their insulated lives are not perfect but it works. Until the unnamed teenage protagonist bonds with Ayale, a charismatic parking lot attendant who rules this part of Boston, the teen soon finds herself caught up in something bigger than herself. Throughout the book, she serves as an unreliable narrator as she lays out how she and her father ended up on the run and living in an isolated island community.

The book is well written and dives into a very specific world. There was this constant unnerving tone to the book where you kept waiting for something big to happen. Did I necessarily understand everything that was happening towards the end of this book ? Not really,  but I enjoyed learning about the Ethiopian culture and about the community in Boston.  There are a ton of inserting characters and I liked the how it presents the narrators’ father as this introverted and closed-off man who is being a father the best way he can. At first, it is so easy to find fault with him but as the book goes on you start to understand what kind of father he is.

Check out the audio review atAudioFile Magazine!