Review: 'Ramadan Ramsey,' by Louis Edwards

"Ramadan Ramsey" starts with a simple sentence and a grand tone: "Ramadan was blessed." What follows feels like the beginning of a tall tale, where a boy with a terrible temper that "might somehow be employed to destroy" stomps through his grandmother's New Orleans duplex. The tension is high. The bullish 5-year-old is "gritting his teeth and growling like a madman."

It's only when his grandmother, Mama Joon, waves a dishrag like a matador that he rushes into his caretaker's arms, sedated by love.

Indeed, love is what the young boy is blessed with. His conception begins with a forbidden love between Alicia, a young Black New Orleanian, and Mustafa, a Syrian sent overseas to work at his uncle's convenience store. Once a pregnancy is added to this affair, Mustafa is sent back home.

Soon, an incident with a mosquito brings the young mother to her deathbed, placing young Ramadan into the care of his family's matriarch.

Mama Joon, who holds a cache of wealth from an affair with a married judge with a guilty conscience, lavishes Ramadan with her affection and money, and upon her death, Ramadan, now 12, is the envy of his struggling Aunt Clarissa and her sons. So much so that an attempt on the boy's life is made, and Ramadan flees to where he thinks he will find love next: Syria, with hopes to find his father.

The only problem, other than not knowing if his father is still alive, is the Syrian Civil War and the farthest he can go by plane is Turkey. If Ramadan is blessed with love, it seems he is also cursed by circumstance and his adventures are spawned by a need for safety and an attempt to redress his bad fortune: "Deep down," Louis Edwards writes, Ramadan "knew he had a real problem with the powers that be."

"Ramadan Ramsey" is a rollicking and exhilarating novel. Though it begins with the language of tall tales, it has more in common with the 18th-century novel, those long works of fiction named after their heroines that follow their protagonist's moral development. And with characters with names like Clarissa (and Mama Joon's proposed names for Alicia's baby of Pamela and even Tristram), "Ramadan Ramsey" — named, too, after its hero — is a nod to the genre, updated for the 21st century with a Dickensian cast: a surprisingly accurate Jackson Square psychic, a Turkish film student obsessed with Buster Keaton, and a Syrian grandma brandishing a gun.

The characters in this novel, no matter how large or small, are filled with such detail that they seem to magically hum with life. Likewise, Edwards has a knack for transforming the mundane into the holy: Words from the founder of Wrigley's gum can hold the same reverence as passages in the Qur'an, and a potato chip (a "sliver of crispy, savory sustenance") can become a communion wafer.

For sure, Edwards stretches the limits of believability. How can a 12-year-old possibly travel halfway around the world by himself? "It's so easy," is Ramadan's constant refrain, yet is it, truly? Additionally, this book, like its 18th-century predecessors, requires readers' patience as the author digs deep into his characters' interior lives and epiphanies, along with the occasional flight of metaphysical fancy.

Nevertheless, Edwards writes confidently and with gusto. Following him and this irresistible story of a boy's quest for family and identity is — to paraphrase the titular character — so easy!

Eric Nguyen is the author of "Things We Lost to the Water."

Ramadan Ramsey
By: Louis Edwards.
Publisher: Amistad, 400 pages, $27.99.