Review of Secret Son

I read Laila Lalami’s Pulitzer Prize finalist book The Moor’s Account several years ago and loved it. This book, Secret Son, provides the reader with a personal look at the country of Morocco marked by deep economic, social, and political differences. It is the story of Youssef searching for an identity who is caught between the mother who raised him and the father who abandoned and betrayed him and between the poverty, hopelessness, and frustrations of the slums of Casablanca and the wealth of his father’s modern, business world. She tells a personal story but easily raises questions of importance concerning privilege and poverty, secularism and religion, truth and lies, and tradition and modernization. For those of you who had my class on terrorism, I discussed how the leaders of terrorist groups recruited individuals by playing upon their personal/family grievances and frustrations and using that to encourage them to commit acts of violence on behalf of the group. Youssef’s story shows exactly how this can play out. Lalami’s writing is such that you can almost smell Casablanca and the story leaves an indelible memory on the reader.