Adichie weaves stories of heartbreak and travail that are timely, touching, and trenchant.
Four Nigerian women are poised at emotional crossroads that compel them to scrutinize their lives.
Isolated by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Chiamaka, a novelist-turned–travel writer sheltering in suburban Maryland, is struggling to stave off boredom and loneliness through regular Zoom calls with family and friends in the U.S., Europe, and her native Nigeria. It’s not enough, and soon this professional tourist resorts to filling the empty spaces of time with mental excursions through the ruins of past love affairs beginning with Darnell, “the Denzel Washington of academia,” whose magnetism created waiting lists for his art history classes and had Chiamaka looking past his personal slights—for a while, anyway. Then there was Chuka, a more considerate and less mercurial man who shared both her African homeland and an address in the Washington, D.C., area. Nothing wrong there besides what Chia characterizes as “that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love.” As in her previous works of fiction—most recently Americanah (2013)—Adiche makes her prose hum and throb with elegantly wrought and empathetic observations. This style extends into the stories of three other Nigerian women in Chia’s life. Zikora, her best friend, is a tough-minded attorney accustomed to speaking brutal truths to others but vulnerable to ill-starred love affairs with men she thinks of as “thieves of time,” one of whom leaves her while she's pregnant, forcing her to raise a child alone—though not without unexpected help. Kadiatou, Chia’s housekeeper, has overcome challenging odds in raising her gifted daughter, Binta, by herself in America, but is the innocent victim of a sordid scandal that jeopardizes her future. And Chia's cousin, the glamorous, self-possessed Omelogor, is a formidable presence in Nigerian finance but prone to melancholy, rumination, and regret. In today's world, when people seem at once too cut off and too much in each other's business, readers will feel communion with these tense, put-upon, yet resilient women in crisis.
Adichie weaves stories of heartbreak and travail that are timely, touching, and trenchant.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593802724
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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