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“This is a beautifully written and thought-provoking book. My head gets blown off every page. Though it describes Raboteau’s very unique journey for her spiritual Zion, it’s somehow wholly universal, too. Everywhere she goes, she hopes to find some straight and golden thread that would draw a line in the direction home, but instead she finds a tangle of humanity that refuses to adhere to any tidy narrative. An African-American named Robert E. Lee who lives in Ghana. Ethiopian Jews who find Jerusalem but not acceptance. And yet everyone she meets she renders with great deftness and empathy—a novelistic level of detail and understanding. I doubt there will be a more important work of nonfiction this year.”
— Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author
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“Emily Raboteau has written a poignant, passionate, human-scale memoir about the biggest things: identity, faith, and the search for a place to call home in the world. Searching for Zion is as reaching as it is intimate, as original as it is old soul. I didn’t want to put this beautiful book down.”
— Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author
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“A brilliant illustration of the ways in which race is an artificial construct that, like beauty, is often a matter of perspective.”
— Wall Street Journal
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“Thoughtful, well researched, and deeply fascinating.”
— Washington Post
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“An instructive read...[Raboteau] finds the ground she
wants to make her own, and she sinks her roots there.”
— Boston Globe
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“Raboteau’s voice is as complex as her journey. Her
descriptions are cogent and striking. Her irreverence and gumption provide
comic relief and invite the reader to want to be friends with this scribe whose
mouth sometimes gets her in trouble, and who ultimately seems to be as tough as
she is vulnerable. It is undoubtedly an intellectual's path, filled with
detailed discussions of African American religious history, Rastafarian
theology, Ethiopian history and ending with a brilliant analysis of the
prosperity gospel of evangelical mega-churches.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
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“[Raboteau’s] detailed depictions flash with insight and
beauty. A section on slave tourism in Ghana is frankly fascinating, as are the
sections on visiting Birmingham, Alabama, and Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.”
— Los Angeles Times
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“In her frank and expansive new memoir, Emily Raboteau in
essence fans out series of interpretive Rorschach blots, images gathered on an ambitious
journey around the globe. She displays them end to end, like a storyboard: Each
impressionistic, deeply personal vignette is a building block, detailing her
far-flung search for ‘home’—a ‘promised land’ that’s as brick-and-mortar
tangible as it is spiritually confirming.”
— Chicago Tribune
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“In this profound and accessible meditation on race, novelist and scholar Raboteau depicts her travels from Israel and Jamaica to Africa and the Deep South in search of the elusive African-American notion of ‘home.’”
— Publishers Weekly
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“No quest for home is ever limited to a simple place, and
[Raboteau] evokes that reality beautifully…A fresh perspective [on the] elusive
concept of home.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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“The deeply rooted questions about race, belonging,
identity, and travel in this memoir may remind listeners of Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father. A female narrator
with a strong, declarative voice is an excellent choice for one woman’s story
of her personal journey to place her multicultural heritage within a modern
context. Quincy Bernstine’s consistent dramatic persona makes sense of the book’s
dizzying trajectory, which includes trips to Israel, Ethiopia, and New York,
among others. Some may find the delivery unpleasant because the tone is
strident and the pace unrelenting. For the most part, though, the intense
cadence mirrors the cultural and racial musings of the author.”
— AudioFile