An engrossing read with strong characters and a clear portrait of Nigeria then and now.
After 30 years, three college friends from Nigeria reunite for a daughter’s wedding.
As different as they are from each other, Enitan, Zainab, and Funmi were so closely entwined during their turbulent university years that it’s hard to believe they haven’t been together as a threesome since graduation. But Enitan married a redheaded Peace Corps volunteer from Connecticut and immigrated to the United States, where she’s raised a very American daughter. Zainab, the tall, elegant offspring of a Hausa academic, married one of her father’s friends and had four sons. Her husband has now suffered an incapacitating series of strokes, and she, the only one of the friends who didn't study nursing, has become a full-time caretaker. Funmi, the man-killer of the group, is rich, “as in she-has-an-apartment-in-London, shops-at-Harrods rich, as in she-also-has-a-house-in-Lekki-and-a-sprawling-compound-in-her-husband's-village rich. As in...what-her-husband-does-is-ill-defined-and-definitely-involves-bribery, but-she-prefers-not-to-think-about-it rich” The occasion of her daughter Destiny’s marriage has roused her from a midlife coma of boredom, eager to reassemble her friends, invite hundreds of people, and put on the show of the decade. The fact that Destiny shares not a whit of her enthusiasm for this event? Well, maybe if she ignores it, it will go away. Obaro’s debut is a portrait of female friendship that will feel familiar to women everywhere, but it is also infused with Nigerian cultural specificity: food, clothing, religion, music, and ambient threat. “Nigeria unleashed constant reminders of one's mortality: death via traffic accident, a bridge collapse, a plane crash, an especially bad case of malaria, a sloppy blood transfusion, a kidnapping gone wrong, robbery, stress-induced heart attack, food poisoning, an act of black magic, poverty. The ways to die were endless. That's why you had to live, and live ferociously, and often selfishly and exploitatively, but Funmi did not worry herself about these details....It was best to count your blessings and keep it moving.” Perhaps an epilogue could have remedied the abruptness of the ending, which leaves an awful lot up in the air.
An engrossing read with strong characters and a clear portrait of Nigeria then and now.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32029-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.
The reality of climate change serves as the pervasive context for this terrific thriller set on a remote island between Australia and Antarctica.
Four family members and one stranger are trapped on an island with no means of communication—what could go wrong? The setup may sound like a mix of Agatha Christie and The Swiss Family Robinson, but Australian author McConaghy is not aiming for a cozy read. Shearwater Island—loosely based on Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site—is a research station where scientists have been studying environmental change. For eight years, widowed Dominic Salt has been the island’s caretaker, raising his three children in a paradise of abundant wildlife. But Shearwater is receding under rising seas and will soon disappear. The researchers have recently departed by ship, and in seven weeks a second ship will pick up Dominic and his kids. Meanwhile, they are packing up the seed vault built by the United Nations in case the world eventually needs “to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us.” One day a woman, Rowan, washes ashore unconscious but alive after a storm destroys the small boat on which she was traveling. Why she’s come anywhere near Shearwater is a mystery to Dominic; why the family is alone there is a mystery to her. While Rowan slowly recovers, Dominic’s kids, especially 9-year-old Orly—who never knew his mother—become increasingly attached, and Rowan and Dominic fight their growing mutual attraction. But as dark secrets come to light—along with buried bodies—mutual suspicions also grow. The five characters’ internal narratives reveal private fears, guilts, and hopes, but their difficulty communicating, especially to those they love, puts everyone in peril. While McConaghy keeps readers guessing which suspicions are valid, which are paranoia, and who is culpable for doing what in the face of calamity, the most critical battle turns out to be personal despair versus perseverance. McConaghy writes about both nature and human frailty with eloquent generosity.
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250827951
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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