“An Honest Exit” by Dinaw Mengestu is one of those stories where you lose yourself reading it.  For me, that’s a sign that the story is working.  The world drops away.  You forget about what’s happening around you.  You’re totally enveloped in the prose.

What works well in this story is that the narrator is making it up as she goes along.  We don’t know what really happened with her father, and neither does she, but in order to make sense of his life and death she invents the rest of the story.

It’s interesting, timely, and well written.