A House in the Sky

A House in the Sky

by Amanda Lindhout & Sara Corbett

Synopsis:

As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress in Calgary, Alberta, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia-"the most dangerous place on earth." On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road.

Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda converts to Islam as a survival tactic, receives "wife lessons" from one of her captors, and risks a daring escape. Moved between a series of abandoned houses in the desert, she survives on memory-every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity-and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark, being tortured.

Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is the searingly intimate story of an intrepid young woman and her search for compassion in the face of unimaginable adversity.

My thoughts:

I first heard Amanda’s story when she was a keynote at teachers’ convention. There must have been 3000 people in the packed room and while she told her story not a murmur could be heard.   This memoir is just as captivating.  She begins by telling the story of as a child of a dysfunctional family.  To escape, she travels to Calgary after high school, where she earns enough money as a waitress to begin her lifelong dream of travelling the world.  She went from South America to Asia to increasingly risky trips into Pakistan, Syria, and Afghanistan. While working as a freelance journalist, Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan, an Australian photographer, travelled to Somalia where they are kidnapped and held for ransom.  A ransom that both the Canadian and Australian governments refused to pay.  She writes of her months of captivity with an honesty that at times is difficult to read.  She talks about the teenage soldiers who guarded them with an understanding  voice that places no blame on the teenage boys that brutalized her while in captivity.  She is betrayed by Nigel, beaten and sexually abused and, as her health declines, she creates “a house in the sky” to hold  everything she loves.  Teens will appreciate the honesty and be inspired by the survival of Lindhout. They will also be amazed by forgiveness that Lindhout demonstrates by her current work establishing a school for Somalian refugees in Nairobi.