Rating: 
Summary: Not There
Review: Blurbs from Andrea Barrett and Charles Baxter brought me to this book, which I found underdeveloped and unaffecting. This is not a good sign when the key event is the heart-rending massacre of one ethnic group by another in Burundi. "The True Sources of the Nile" has a good premise: Anne, an aid worker, is completely in love with Tutsi official Jean-Pierre. Their passionate affair is interrupted when Anne is called back to the U.S., where her mother has been diagnosed with cancer. After a miserable time with her touchy family, Anne returns to Burundi and an outbreak of ethnic violence that leaves thousands dead, including many members of Jean-Pierre's family. She also hears some frightening rumors about his past, which make her question her future with this man she deeply loves.Anne never develops into much more than someone who is very much in love. She does not seem to be someone well enough rooted to the ground to command the position of protagonist. Jean-Pierre is passionate and that's about it. You begin be get interested in Anne's friendship with his sister and that plug is pulled. The Burundi scenes do not seem very real and the Burundian characters are stuck to the page. On the other hand, many of the Sonoma County scenes, especially the ones with Anne's mother, leap off the page and, boy, do you understand why Anne prefers the Third World. But then again, that lack of connection. Her family owns apple orchards, but they might as well own a hardware store for all the shading that adds to the story. The orchards seem to exist merely for Anne to parrot to a sister that in Burundi apples cost some appalling price per pound. "The True Sources of the Nile" earned some early buzz and a big advance. Good for author Sarah Stone! This suggests that she will have the chance to write again. She's got the talent, and I'm sure her next effort will be more complete. If you want to read a truly heartbreaking book about the Tutsi/Hutu horrors, pick up Philip Gourevich's "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families
Rating: 
Summary: Insight into love and war
Review: First of all, this was one gripping read--I'm usually too busy to devour books in one weekend, but this one had me. And although Sarah Stone knows how to write a compelling love story, she doesn't stop there--she uses the love affair to investigate the nature of war, and the flawed but universal human qualities responsible. I've read newspaper accounts of genocide in other countries, and have never been able to wrap my mind around it. It's always seemed impossible to understand the motivation for holding on so tightly to longstanding traditions of hatred and brutality. And I have to admit that, like some of the American characters in this novel, I haven't really wanted to think about it. The True Sources of the Nile put faces on the abstract numbers, and helped me understand. I found the characters complex and fascinating--not just the American protagonist, Anne, and her California family, but also the Burundians, especially Anne's lover Jean-Pierre and his sister. I was fascinated by Burundi, by its culture of secrecy, by its landscape, by Jean-Pierre's attempts to elucidate his country with stories and the occasional folktale. I was also impressed by the convincing portrayal of the world of Northern California--the author is able to convey its New Age quirks without making it just a caricature (for example, a past-life regression scene serves a surprisingly serious purpose). The way the Burundi and California plotlines shed light on each other and weave together thematically is nothing short of amazing. Two things become utterly clear: Burundi's culture is utterly alien to our own, and yet human nature is the same everywhere. Another thing I like about this book is that its characters are smart people who are genuinely trying to figure out the world and explain their worldviews articulately. The book goes some dark places, especially in the latter half. The violence never struck me as gratuitous, though. And ultimately the novel doesn't leave you feeling bleak. The author clearly understands the worst of human behavior, our endless capacity for self-deception, harm, and betrayal. But she also knows we're equally capable of insight, healing, and loyalty.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning, Delicate, Haunting
Review: I read this book in two days and immediately purchased three more to give to friends. I highly recommend it.
Stone weaves history and the immediacy of life in Brundi into a compelling narrative about one woman's search for who she is, where she has come from, and what she wants out of life. The narrative moves between Brundi and Northern California, and although this may be jarring at first, it makes perfect sense as Anne's various dilemmas and challenges unfold. Anne's relationship to her family, her mother in particular, is integral to the overall story.
The ending is both unsettling and satisfying; Stone didn't flinch from letting some of Anne's issues remain unresolved --this is not a book with easy answers, or even many answers about family, history, violence, love, duty.
Perhaps what impressed me most was Stone's ability to convey the exurberance of love, the delicacy of life, and the utter horror of violence unleased.
Rating: 
Summary: Too much melodrama for me
Review: My previous review was deleted because I used the word "dreck." This book would trade the massacres of Rwanda and Burundi for a soapy Mill Valley love affair, and I think that's tragic. A thoroughly disappointing book.
Rating:
Summary: Too much melodrama for me
Review: My previous review was deleted because I used the word "dreck." This book would trade the massacres of Rwanda and Burundi for a soapy Mill Valley love affair, and I think that's tragic. A thoroughly disappointing book.
Rating: 
Summary: not sure what to make of this...
Review: Perhaps I would have enjoyed this book had I not recently finished "We Regret to Inform You..." (which I highly recommend). I had no sympathy for the female protagonist - found her immature, self-centered, naive - typical of the "peace-keepers" and "humanitarians" that Gourevitch describes, who have done so much more harm than good. Sarah Stone had an opportunity to enlighten and educate objectively, and it's a shame that she focused on a not very gripping romance instead.
Rating:
Summary: Terrific!
Review: The True Sources of the Nile is a beautiful novel that explores love, sex, grief and denial with unflinching candor and depth. As was said in the review of the novel in O Magazine, no one is writing better about the nature of female sexual desire than Sarah Stone, and this is also true of how she handles dysfunctional family dynamics, sibling loyalties, and the truth that what you are worried about is never that which you should actually fear. The True Sources of the Nile is a compelling, evocative and ultimately satisfying read that I strongly recommend.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting tale of love, revelation, and betrayal
Review: This book nicely illustrates what happens as two people who have fallen in love move beyond the initial attraction/lust stage to the learning to love eachother stage amid the backdrop of the genocide in Burundi in 1993. What does happen when the person you (think that you) love turns out not to be the person you thought s/he was? Annie is a public health worker in Burundi, and has been having a torrid affair with Jean-Pierre, a member of Burundi's ruling class, when events in both the United States (her mother's cancer & her sisters' insistence that she return home) and in Burundi (the genocide following the elections) force the lovers apart, and thus giving them the chance to reassess their relationship. Although the book deals with the themes of love and betrayal in the context of an affair, these topics and issues can occur in any kind of relationship, but the added sexual tension makes the revelations much more poignant. Annie has some very hard questions to ask herself as she gains both physical and emotional distance from Jean-Pierre. Can the relationship ever move forward given what she now knows about him? Can she accept what he has done both in the past as well as what he has contributed to this latest atrocities in Burundi? Can she justify it in any way? The author does a good job conveying Annie's quandry to the readers, making us feel her pain as she learns things about her lover that she never imagined possible. I also liked very much how the author drew the complicated relationships Annie has with her family in California. These relationships too are fraught with pain, unresolved and much less talked about issues, hurts, jealousies, the usual kinds of things that often go on in families.
As I was reading the novel, I did wonder why Annie was with Jean-Pierre. I got the impression that it was mostly sexual, yet even Annie began to realize that Jean-Pierre could be cold, distant, withdrawn, uncommunicative, etc. In fact, in many ways, just like her family! Neither Annie nor Jean-Pierre (nor Annie's family) tell eachother about important things in their lives. There is a strong element of secrecy and mystery, much like the source of the Nile, to their relationship. This secrecy, of course, is ultimately what truly contributes to the destruction of their relationship (besides the horrific things that Jean-Pierre has done).
In other ways, good as the novel is, I found that I was annoyed with certain aspects of it. I really did not like the rushed and conveniently tidied up ending. I got the feeling that the author was under time and space pressure to finish the novel, so she quickly paired Annie off with someone who was not even a blip on her radar screen during the novel. I would think that since this relationship was such an important one for Annie, she would have handled the ending differently. There were also times when I found myself annoyed and angry with Annie for being so blind and stupid. She is 37 years old, not a young kid, yet she is given clues that she either chooses to blithely ignore (naively thinking it could not possibly be real) or does not attach any significance to them. Was she thinking at all? She also does not ask her lover (nor herself) some of the tough questions she clearly needs to ask. The few times she did ask and was stonewalled, she instantly caved and offered sex as a peace offering to make things right (i.e., uncomplicated) between her and Jean-Pierre. I thought that she really did not want to know the real, complete Jean-Pierre. Granted, lovers do not reveal everything to eachother immediately, and part of the joy of a relationship is the gradual peeling away of the facade presented to the world to reveal the real person within. What happens when what is revealed is something that goes against your moral fiber, the core of what you value? If you justify it, or decide that you love the person, not the deed, can you live with yourself? In what way does it affect the relationship? Is any relationship worth compromising your moral core, your values if the act is antithetical to your values, morals, and ethics?
Rating:
Summary: This is an exceptional book!
Review: What I loved best about Sarah Stone's "The True Sources of the Nile" was that it deftly handled a wide range of complex emotions and questions, from "why do we wage war?" to "why do we love those we love?" "Why do we continue to love those we'd rather not love?" This novel, however, ultimately deals with disallusionment, not--as one Amazon reviewer put it--"romance." Though romance is the arena in which the theme of disallusionment most frequently performs, the novel is not at heart a romance: the protagonist's ideals are tested and revised, whereas in true romances such ideals are either abetted or left unexamined. I found it both wonderful and painful to watch Anna--the relatively young, optimistic protagonist--grapple with the macrocosmic forces of war, clan loyalty and death in Burundi, even as she struggles with these same forces on microcosmic levels with her family in California. Unlike most white authors who attempt to write their versions of "my Peace Corps years in Africa," Stone presents a un-exoticized Burundi whose history is magnificent, terrible and fractured. Stone shows how the cruelest effect of Beligan and German colonization of what was once Ruanda-Urundi was it's transformation of victims into victimizers--a thread which sadly runs through the whole of human history. Stone's acknowledgement of this as a universal dilemma raises the novel above scores of acerbically written, tsk-tsk novels in which African countries are mere backdrops for Euro-Western proselytizing. In the "Acknowledgments" section of the novel, Stone concludes, "...it is a human urge to cut a gravestone, out of whatever materials we have." Stone suggests, by way of her incredibly written novel in which both hope and love are tested by the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, that this material is more often than not the human heart. Buy the book and be amazed.
Rating:
Summary: Wow, What a Pageturner
Review: Wow, what a pageturner. This is a love story set against the backdrop of war that won't allow for any easy or romantic answers. I love it when a book makes you stay up late till your eyes hurt. The True Sources of the Nile immediately sucked me in. The characters have such depth, such complexities to them. You think you know a character and then you get a little surprise, half-way through the book, or at the very end. Sarah Stone completely captures the nuances of family relationships, with old loyalties and grudges. I highly highly recommend this book!
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