Moving on after loss in Desert Echoes

 

This post is about Desert Echoes by Abdi Nazemian. And I think this might actually only be the second book by him that I’ve read. It’s the case of I have no idea why it took me so long to get around to another one of his books. But I found this one in Gay’s the Word down in London. I bought it the same time I got Legend of the White Snake.

The blurb says that fifteen-year-old Kam is head over heels for Ash, the boy who swept him off his feet. But his family and best friend, Bodie, are worried. They struggle to understand Ash. He also has a habit of disappearing, at times for days. When Ash asks Kam to join him on a trip to Joshua Tree, the two of them walk off into the sunset… but only Kam returns. Two years later, Kam is still left with a hole in his heart and too many unanswered questions. So it feels like fate when a school trip takes him back to Joshua Tree. In the desert, Kam must reckon with the truth of his past relationship – and the possibility of opening himself up to love once again.

The book jumps between two different years, Kam’s first year and his junior year, and it goes between the time after Ash has disappeared and before Kam met him and the two of them getting to know each other. But in the first chapter, it’s junior year and you see Kam still reeling from Ash’s disappearance amidst this plan for the school’s GSA final trip which is going to be up to Joshua Tree. So you see, a bit throughout the book, Kam wrestling with whether he should go or not. It’s the case of whether he goes back to the place where he last saw Ash, and how that’s going to impact him, whether it’ll be good for him or not.

When they meet, Kam is the oldest in his year, whereas Ash in the youngest in his year, and I believe that Kam (and also his best friend, Bodie) were kept back a year by their parents. Not as a school thing. I remember the actual reason why was in the book, but considering I read the entire first half of this book on trains to and from Manchester, I ended up making a whole two lines worth of notes, and stupidly, didn’t write down the reason. So, Kam ended up being, I believe, three years below Ash in school, but two in age. But the two of them start talking in the first place because they’re both in choir, and their choir teacher tells them to anonymously write down songs they want to perform, and both Kam and Ash end up writing down the same Lana del Rey song.

I just need to take a moment to talk about their connection to Lana, because it’s wild. She’s clearly both of their favourite singers, and they’re both definitely younger than me, because Lana released her first album before I went to university, and in this book’s universe, Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd is Lana’s most recently album, so it’s safe to say they’ve not been around the whole Lana time. But the way they talk about her, it’s exactly how you would expect one of those stan accounts you’d see on Twitter. One of the one’s that you know is absolutely run by someone whose brain hasn’t fully developed yet. The two of them talk like they know more about Lana than anyone else in the world, and I just loved seeing it, because was I exactly the same about The Saturdays when I was their age? Embarrassingly, yes.

So much of the book, for me, was spent feeling bad for Kam. There’s a section when he and Bodie go and have a meal with Ash’s family, and throughout the book (or at least the first half, as I write this specific point) Kam never believed that Ash was dead during the fact he had disappeared, whereas his family had fully grieved and just accepted that he was gone. And this was what left me feeling so bad for Kam. Like, no one knew for certain Ash was dead or just disappeared, but Kam was holding on so hard to the fact Ash just had to be still alive that it was impacting the rest of his life as well, including his relationship with his parent(s). I frame it that way as his dad is there in the earlier year, but in the present time, it’s just him and his mother.

Ash obviously ends up disappearing, given how much of the book is about it, but I really appreciated the story being in two parts, because I don’t think it would have worked as well otherwise. I know that the book could easily have all just been in the time after Ash disappeared, and that then it could have been more about Kam’s grief than it actually was, but I don’t think that would have hit as hard. I think this book needed, well, it didn’t need to be split in two, but it was better for being split in two. Because you knew that Ash was going to disappear, you spent the times when Kam was in the past waiting for it to happen. There was the suspense there and it kept you on edge. I think the use of both time periods was used well, because in the past, Kam was so love blind, and then in the present, he was learning things about both himself and Ash that then ended up making the two of them in the past make more sense. Like, it was awful seeing some of the things that you’d see, but with the context you were given, it all made so much more sense.

You find the truth about what happens with Ash, and whether he’s alive or not – I’m not going to spoil what happens. My brain wants me to write that it was nice to see, but I desperately need to clarify so there’s context! It wasn’t nice finding out whether someone was dead or not, but it was relieving to get to know the truth. (Although, in the context, if you find out they’re alive, then it is nice.) And in knowing the truth, you realised that it let Kam move on with his life and push forward with the relationships he’s also got around him – those ones being with Bodie, his mother, and his father. It gave him the opportunity to grow as a person.

I think I wanted a slightly different ending. I’m not mad about how the book ended by any means. I think everything ended, honestly, solidly. I would have just personally liked an epilogue, but an epilogue that had been a little later in time. This whole section is literally just for me to say that I’m greedy and want more content, that’s literally it. I would have loved to see a section at the end of the book that once Kam knew the truth, I wanted to see how his life changed and where he went with it, especially since throughout the book he did wrestle with so many different things. You know, his parents, what he was going to do after high school. I say that last point especially since Bodie knew he wanted to go to culinary school, but Kam didn’t particularly know, and sort of was just following Bodie around.

Anyway, you’re welcome for this jumble of thoughts. Whether they were coherent or not. I feel like both Abdi Nazemian books I’ve read have had a similar vibe to them in that it’s not so much a boom pow here’s the plot kind of thing, but more of a let’s take a walk and experience this journey together kind of thing.

Okay, bye!