The joys of motherhood brilliantly illustrates why we write entire novels. Sometimes worlds, feelings, transitions, people, countries cannot be captured by a sole sentence or even a review. This books wrenched my heart, stole my breath and carried me through hope and despair, lives and worlds. It made me reevaluate my relationships with other people. It made me mourn the depravity of the world. It made me dance with hope of the good in life. “In Ibuza sons help their father more than they help […]
The Fishermen: a faint nipple on the debut book horizon
I had the immense pleasure of watching the author speak. Obiama is an incredibly charming, humble and wellspoken man and it is with great regret that his debut novel is nothing more that mediocre. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The novel is warm and full of faults and tiny promises. But it is also a novel in dire need of editing. Too many strands of plot got in the way of the story, overly flourish prose stilted the pace, and somehow still made […]
Lovely writing and fresh story, but somehow came up short for me
This is a moving book and certainly worth reading, but I had such high hopes after the first few chapters and ended up feeling a little disappointed that the amazingness didn’t quite carry through to the end. This is a coming of age story of a Nigerian girl, Ijeoma, set in Nigeria in the late 1960s. Ijeoma’s world is disrupted when her beloved father is killed in a civil war (the Biafran War) and her mother sends her away to live with a teacher’s family while […]
Can We Find Ourselves by Going Home?
This is my 103rd review. I think three things have made my reading output this year increase exponentially. Those three would be: no cable television, the discovery that audiobooks work for me as part of my current commute, and the Read Harder challenge put on by Book Riot. (Although, the last two are really one in the same.) I am in the middle of listening to my 17th audiobook of the year, and Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief completes my final of […]
A Different Perspective
“But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.” [359] The summer before beginning college, I received a package from my new school. It was a paperback copy of The English Patient (1992) by Michael Ondaatje. This was the summer reading for all incoming first year students, and the enclosed letter explained that we would have a book discussion during orientation. […]
Foreign Gods, Inc.
This is the seventh of ten African books. I’ve been trying to get these books from different African countries, but Nigerian authors are so prolific! They’re hard to escape. Maybe after I finish the ten, I’ll seek out more non-Nigerian books to even it out. Foreign Gods, Inc. is about Ike, a cabdriver in NYC who had a promising future…until he married poorly and started gambling. Embarrassed by his failures (and his ex-wife), he ignores his mother’s e-mailed pleas for help–he can’t send money home, […]