Tag: literary fiction

#BookReview How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

whatcathyreadnext2 Comments

How Beautiful We WereAbout the Book

Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made – and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest only. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. But their fight will come at a steep price, one which generation after generation will have to pay.

Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

Format: Hardcover (368 pages)       Publisher: Canongate
Publication date: 11th March 2021 Genre: Literary Fiction

Find How Beautiful We Were on Goodreads

Purchase links
Bookshop.org
Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Hive | Amazon UK
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The story is told from multiple points of view, including a group of children, ‘age-mates’ born in the same year, who act rather like the Chorus in a Greek play. This structure allows the reader to see the story from a number of different perspectives, reflecting the varying experiences and attitudes of young and old, male and female. It also gave a sense of the oral storytelling tradition.

I was less a fan of the frequently shifting timelines meaning that the story goes back and forth in time. One moment a character is dead, the next moment they are still in prison. I confess I found this both confusing and distracting. I was grateful when I reached the section told from the point of view of Thula’s grandmother, Yaya, not just because it revealed the history of the injustices visited on the people of Kosawa over many generations – slavery, forced labour on rubber plantations, the destruction of their land by the construction of oil pipelines – but because it was narrated in a largely linear fashion, placing into some order the events featured in previous sections.

The book conveys a strong sense of the traditional beliefs and customs that form the backbone of life in the village. How its inhabitants see themselves as different from, even distrustful of, those who live in the towns; tribal and family ties being more important than nationality. The villagers of Kosawa gain strength from their belief that the spirits of their ancestors guide and protect them, as represented in the village anthem: “Sons of the leopard, daughters of the leopard, beware all who dare wrong us, never will our roar be silenced.”

The reader learns about what is a strongly patriarchal society, in which women’s role is largely confined to cooking, cleaning and child-rearing and women who lose their husbands are unable to remarry. ‘You can be alone, the men say to us. You’re a woman, you’re built to endure.’ However, it’s also a community that comes together to mark events such as births, the passage into manhood, marriages and deaths. Sadly, the village witnesses many of the latter.

The spirit of resistance is most clearly represented by Thula who is described as having ever since the day she was born ‘wanted what she wanted’. I’m always drawn to characters who demonstrate a love of books and reading so it’s no surprise I warmed to Thula for whom, as her mother Sahel observes, books become ‘her pillow and her blanket, her plate of food and the water that quenched her thirst’. Thula’s education takes her away, first from her village, and then from her country to America. However, Kosawa and its plight remains forever in her thoughts, and in her heart.  She becomes both an enabler and catalyst for action against the oil company, Pexton, and later a figurehead for much wider change.

One of the last sections of the book, narrated from the point of view of Thula’s brother, Juba, was less compelling than I’d hoped. For me, it got rather bogged down in the details of negotiations, court cases and preparations for the campaign led by Thula.  It also included a brief return to the back and forth in time that I’ve mentioned earlier, and there were some parts I felt were redundant.

Although I may have had some reservations about the structure and pace of the book, I had no doubts about the quality of the writing. If you can get past what, for me, was the book’s rather convoluted structure – and I’m conscious other readers may find it imaginative rather than distracting – How Beautiful We Were is a powerful story about the fight against injustice, corruption and environmental destruction.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Canongate via NetGalley.

In three words: Powerful, emotional, authentic

Try something similar: Wake Me When I’m Gone by Odafe Atogun

Follow this blog via Bloglovin

Imbolo MbueAbout the Author

Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been translated into eleven languages, adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a mini-series. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York. (Photo credit: Goodreads author page)

Connect with Imbolo
Website | Facebook | Goodreads

#BookReview Nick by Michael Farris Smith @noexitpress

whatcathyreadnext2 Comments

NickAbout the Book

Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby’s world, he was at the centre of a very different story – one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I. Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed first-hand, Nick embarks on a redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance – doomed from the very beginning – to the dizzying frenzy of New Orleans, rife with its own flavour of debauchery and violence.

Charged with enough alcohol, heartbreak and yearning to transfix even the heartiest of golden age scribes, Nick reveals the man behind the narrator who has captivated readers for decades.

Format: Hardcover (320 pages)           Publisher: No Exit Press
Publication date: 25th February 2021 Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

Find Nick on Goodreads

Purchase links
Bookshop.org
Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Hive | Amazon UK
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The year 2021 marks the 125th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birth and his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, coming out of copyright in the USA. Nick is described by the publishers as Michael Farris Smith’s attempt to pull Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, ‘out of the shadows and into the spotlight’.

In his foreword to Nick, Farris Smith notes that, in The Great Gatsby, Nick provides very little information about himself. Essentially, the reader knows only that he fought in the Great War, he was from the Midwest and that he was turning thirty years of age. Using this sparse information as a starting point, the author sets out to imagine the events that shaped the character of Nick Carraway the reader will meet in The Great Gatsby.

Of the three things mentioned above, the fact he fought in the Great War is the biggest focus of Nick. Indeed, the scenes in the trenches of the Western Front were the most compelling parts of the book for me. There is a particularly gripping episode in which Nick joins the rest of his troop on an advance over rain-soaked terrain in a forest held by German forces. Later, Nick volunteers to work in the tunnels being excavated under the enemy trenches, becoming a “listener” whose role is to detect the sound of German troops or tunnellers. In a nod to his future role as narrator of The Great Gatsby, he proves himself an exceptionally good listener.  Later in the book, whilst working for a brief time in the family hardware shop, the author has him become a good observer too, noticing the mannerisms of customers and able to predict their needs before they express them.

Although the sections set in the war were descriptively the most compelling parts of the book for me, of course there is no sense of jeopardy for Nick himself, only for others around him; we know Nick will survive to appear in The Great Gatsby. What the author can do is explore the experiences that may have shaped him. Farris Smith does so by imagining a love affair between Nick and a woman called Ella he meets while on leave in Paris, and by having Nick haunted in the years to come by traumatic wartime memories that manifest themselves in nightmares and panic attacks.

There is very little reference to Nick’s early life in the Midwest, except for some brief childhood memories of his father’s despair at Nick’s mother’s periods of depression. Rather than returning home after the war, there is a long section of the book in which Nick travels to New Orleans. The destination is chosen on a whim reflecting the restlessness at the heart of his character. There he becomes involved with Judah, a wounded veteran of the Great War. ‘And if there is one thing the lost are able to recognise it is the others who are just as wounded and wandering.’  Some of the melodramatic events that follow felt a little out of character with the rest of the book for me although the atmosphere of the period is vividly recreated.

Nick is not so much a prequel to The Great Gatsby as a homage to Fitzgerald’s novel. Indeed, it’s only in the very final pages that Nick arrives at the location of the opening scenes of that book. This means readers unfamiliar with The Great Gatsby will find themselves at no disadvantage and can base their judgment of Nick solely on how successfully they feel Farris Smith has created a story about a young man who just happens to be called Nick.  For readers like myself who have read Fitzgerald’s original, it has definitely made me curious to read The Great Gatsby again and pay more attention to its narrator.

My thanks to Lisa at No Exit Press for my proof copy of Nick. You can watch a replay of the online launch of Nick during which Michael Farris Smith talked about the book with Alison Flood of The Guardian by clicking on the following link:  https://www.crowdcast.io/e/book-launch-of-nick-by 

In three words: Dramatic, intriguing, assured

Try something similar: The Road To Grantchester by James Runcie

Follow this blog via Bloglovin

Michael Farris SmithAbout the Author

Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, Southern Living, Book Riot, and numerous others, and have been named Indie Next List, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. He has been a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, the Gold Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix des Lectrices in France, and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun, and more. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters. (Photo credit: Publisher author page)

Connect with Michael
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram