baking cakes in Kigali

I'm going to start here and make myself sound really morbid and strange here, I have a thing about Genocide.
Obviously I don't like it, but for some reason it fascinates me. I think it has to do with the completely incomprehensible reasoning behind it and the actual ability to carry out something so atrocious.
I also think it also has something to do with the fact that the Rwanda genocide happened within my living memory, I was 11 when it took place in 1994 and it scares me that these atrocities can still happen.
Hearing about how the international community pretended that it wasn't a genocide and didn't do anything to save so many people was one of the things that got me involved in human rights, and I now feel that not knowing anything about the bad things that happen in our world and what has happened seems kind of disrespectful to other peoples suffering.
For a good grounding in knowledge of what led up to the genocide I'd recommend the BBC article here and the website Rwanda: the wake of genocide here.
The second website also has a section on how you can help.
For these reasons I was kind of nervous about reading Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin.
I love a good fiction book about these sort of things as it can often bring the human and feeling side of tragedies across in a way that reading a non fiction book can't sometimes.
The problem though when a author tackles such a subject though can be them going too melodramatic which can come across as trite if they've never experienced anything like it themselves. or sometimes they just skip over the details because they're too afraid to get it wrong.
Fortunately I needn't have worried, this book was a delight to read. The author has lived all over Africa and has volunteered in Rwanda with survivors which is where many of her stories have come from.
The story focuses on the Character Angel Tungaraza who has moved to Rwanda 4 years after the genocide with her husband and she runs a cake making business.
Through her business Angel interacts with many different types of residents of Kigali and learns more about the country where she is living and ultimatly herself aswell.
Angel is a kind of international character, having been to many different parts of the world and acts as a kind of ambasador for how we think here in the west.
She holds many traditional views but is ultimatly quite a progressive forward thinking character.
This works well for me in the story, as it makes sense for why she can pry so many secrets out of so many different types of people.
What I really liked was that all the stories that she's told come out in a real conversation style. Pretty much how you find out about people in real life.
This did leave me sometimes wishing that I could learn more about certain characters, but it did make sense. After all no one tells you everything about themselves in one go.
The book also managed to touch on many important issues in Africa. Aids is both a shadow in the background and at the forefront of this novel, touching nearly everyone in the novel in some way even if they're not willing to talk about it.
Another area which is covered well is how Rwandans are learning to live together again, a beautiful quote from the book is
"It doesn't matter if in the past some of us thought we were this and some of us thought we were that. There is no more this or that now. Now we are all Banyarwando. Rwandans."
Ultimately this book is about hope and reconciliation, a theme that runs throughout the book in nearly every character.
I fully recommend this to anyone, this book is both at once touching and funny.
Finally I was going to tell you to go out and read we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed along with our families by Phillip Gourevitch, a book full of real life accounts of what happened. It's a tough read but worth it. Then I was gonna suggest watching Hotel Rwanda, an amazing film based on real life which will have you both sobbing and feeling really uplifted to know that such brave people are alive, but I found this review at page247 who got there before me! It's a very good review so check it out.
I think you can guess what I'll be cooking for this one....Cakes!