This was a kind of a placeholder for me. I’m not allowing myself to reread American Gods again, because I reread it less than a year ago, and I love it too much, and the TV series is coming, and it’s my favorite kind of book, so I had to find a proxy, and this looked super interesting. And it was good, but not amazing (nothing is American Gods, goddamnit!). I think the hardest for me was that Ike is no hero, antihero, complicated scamp, […]
Happy African Feminist
I have been meaning to read We Should All Be Feminists for some time and then finally, today, on International Women’s Day of all days, my sister lent me her copy. And, because it’s only 52 pages including the Introduction and the About the Author section, I read it with my morning granola. And it is brilliant. I will say that one of the personal reasons it appealed to me is that my fiancé is African. Not from Nigeria, but from a small, West African […]
Please excuse me while I furiously try to make my cannonball goal
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 […]