UNDER THE UDALA TREES

Name: UNDER THE UDALA TREES
Author: Chinelo Okparanta
ISBN: 978-0-544-00344-6

by Chinelo Okparanta ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 2015

Written with courage and compassion, this debut novel by Okparanta (Happiness, Like Water, 2013) stunningly captures a young...

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In 1968, during the second year of the war between Biafra and Nigeria, 11-year-old Ijeoma is sent away from her home in Ojoto for safety by her mother, Adaora.

Ijeoma’s father, Uzo, is dead, destroyed in a bombing raid that nearly decimated their village, and her mother is quickly unraveling, unable to cope with the ongoing war and famine. But Adaora’s love for her daughter is limitless; when Ijeoma was born early, for example, Adaora gave herself headaches learning about nutrition to make sure her baby grew healthy. Okparanta is masterful at articulating the pressures living through endless violence has on each of her characters' psyches; Adaora crumbles under the harshness of the ongoing war. Her plan is to go to her parents’ house in Aba and see if things are better there while Ijeoma stays with friends in Nnewi; she'll send for the girl to join her when it's safe. But Ijeoma feels this separation is prompted less by necessity than by the fact that Adaora now finds her daughter an impossible burden. Alone in Nnewi, Ijeoma falls in love with another displaced girl, Amina. But when their relationship is discovered, Ijeoma is sent back to her mother, who is determined to teach Ijeoma that two girls can't be romantically involved. In the years following, Ijeoma must reconcile her feelings toward women with the pressure to marry a man and be accepted in a country that makes being gay punishable by death. In language both sparse and lyrical, Okparanta manages to articulate a child's wide-eyed understanding of the breakdown of the world around her. We see, too, a detailed rebuilding of that world along with Ijeoma's maturity into womanhood. Here is writing rich in the beautiful intimacies of people who love each other—and wise about the importance of holding onto those precious connections in a world that is, more often than not, dangerous and cold.

Written with courage and compassion, this debut novel by Okparanta (Happiness, Like Water, 2013) stunningly captures a young girl’s coming of age against the backdrop of a nation at war.

Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-544-00344-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
HARRY SYLVESTER BIRD
by Chinelo Okparanta

- BOOK REVIEW
HAPPINESS, LIKE WATER
by Chinelo Okparanta

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FRIDAY BLACK

by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2018

Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.

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Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.

The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.

Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- PROFILES
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

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NEVER LET ME GO

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2005

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

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An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).

Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.