Published August 2025 via HarperAlley
★★★★
Nimmi has grown up in the US, living with her father and communicating with her mother only through letters—but when her father has the opportunity to return to Sri Lanka, where Nimmi is born and her mother still lives, she's desperate to go too. Sri Lanka is still at war, though, and Nimmi soon feels in over her head. And: It's December of 2004. None of them can know what's coming.
This is a graphic novel for young adults, but it's one for readers who can take heavy themes. The major themes are the war in Sri Lanka and the Boxing Day tsunami—Nimmi finds herself witness to the first and right in the middle of the second. (I was going to say that it doesn't hold back, but I don't think that's entirely accurate—for all that Nimmi witnesses, she's on the periphery of violence and presumably has significant protection conferred by her dual citizenship; this would be a very different story if it were about someone living in the thick of it. Nimmi hears some of those stories, but she and the reader are spared the worst of it. She sees bodies (I remember reading news story after news story and just not being able to comprehend the scale of the disaster), but the reader is again spared the worst of it.
It's well done. I didn't need the mini romance of the book (I never need the mini romance), but there's a lot of complexity packed into a relatively short story. War, natural disaster, romance, identity, family history, family reconciliation...I hope this ends up in a lot of high school libraries.
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