The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Wamariya, Clemantine. The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After. Penguin Random House LLC, 2018.

Clemantine Wamariya's The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, is a first person memoir tracing Clemantine's life before, during, and after the Rwandan genocide. The novel is written in the past tense, and employs a fragmented structure. The following summary follows a linear trajectory.

Clemantine was born in Kigali, Rwanda, where she lived with her parents and siblings for the first years of her life. When Clemantine was six years old, Rwandan political conflicts between the Hutus and Tutsi ethnic groups broke out. As the Hutus became increasingly violent, Clemantine's life in Kigali grew smaller and smaller. Eventually, her parents sent her and her sister, Claire to stay with their grandmother. Not long after arriving, Clemantine and Claire fled.

Over the months and years that followed, the sisters learned how to survive in impossible circumstances. They stayed in innumerable refugee camps, where Claire consistently sought out work and made money. While living at an UNHCR refugee camp, a Zairean CARE worker professed his love to Claire. Though she initially refused his proposal, Claire eventually accepted. She believed marriage was the only way to get papers and escape the camp.

After their wedding, Rob moved Claire and Clemantine to Zaire to stay with his family. For a time, the sisters' life felt peaceful and easy. Clemantine grew close with Rob's mother, siblings, and cousins. Not long later, however, fighting broke out in northern Zaire, and the city where Rob's family lived grew unsafe. The family was forced to leave. Clemantine was distraught. In their subsequent travels, Clemantine distracted herself by devoting her attention to Claire's new baby, Mariette. She was more interested in protecting Mariette, than she was herself.

Over the following months, Claire and Rob moved the family numerous times. The constant relocations angered and frustrated Clemantine. Rob worsened her emotional state. He was either beating Claire, cheating on her, landing in jail, or abandoning the family altogether. Though Claire and Clemantine were happy when Rob was gone, they also needed him to protect them from other more dangerous men. With time, Claire and Clemantine made their way to South Africa with Mariette, where they reconnected with Rob. Life in South Africa was peaceful for a time. However, Claire remained determined not to settle. Then, when she discovered she was pregnant again, Rob insisted she take Clemantine and Mariette and return to Rwanda. Because Claire believed she was supposed to obey her husband, she took her sister and baby and headed north.

Though Clemantine was upset, she was pleased to be passing through Zaire again. Three years after their departure, they found the city completely destroyed by war and violence. Not long later, Claire gave birth to Freddy. The family fled to Zambia, where a priest urged them to return to South Africa.

After years of wandering, Claire found a job through which she applied for asylum in the United States. After her interview, she, Clemantine, Mariette, Freddy, and Rob moved to Chicago. Though the move offered them physical safety, the unfamiliar culture amplified Clemantine's feelings of dislocation.

While living with a wealthy family in a Chicago suburb, Kenilworth, Clemantine felt a temporary sense of agency. However, she struggled to orient to American life. The survival mechanisms she learned in Africa did not apply to her new American reality. She did not understand her peers, and could not relate to their carefree attitudes. Over time, Clemantine gradually adopted a new version of self. She later applied, and was accepted to Yale University.

While attending Yale, Clemantine discovered new avenues through which she might explore and reconcile with her past. Various trips to Africa, as well as her growing social justice work, compelled Clemantine to confront her memories, and create the narrative of her life on her own terms.