#imbolo mbue

[chellilonaaphra]

#hi #lup.txt #the jungle #a raisin in the sun #the grapes of wrath #god bless you mr Rosewater #behold the dreamers #invisible man #death of a salesman #transcendent kingdom #the great gastby #the house on mango street #upton sinclair #lorraine hansberry #imbolo mbue #ralph ellison #arthur miller #yaa gyasi #john steinbeck #kurt vonnegut #f scott fitzgerald #sandra cisneros

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #1 – How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

I read the overwhelming majority of this book in 2023 but I finished it after new years so review #1 of the new year it is! Despite it by all accounts being very critically acclaimed and well-reviewed, I had absolutely never heard of it before opening up the packaging on a ‘blind date with a book’ thing a bookstore was doing (incredible gimmick, for the record). Overall a great book, if rambling at points and with a somewhat weak and confused ending.

The story takes place in Kosawa, a village on the western periphery of a fictional west African country, with the incredible bad luck to have been built atop a fortune in oil. The story is told through several POVs, and follows the villagers struggle against the Pexton corporation and their country’s de facto neocolonial government to try and have their home restored to what it was before the river and soil were poisoned and children started dying. It’s told on a generational scale – stretching from the ‘80s to the mid 2000’s – and follows the main cast of characters from childhood into their forties, As might be expected from that, it’s not exactly fast-paced or full of heroics – lots of promises and reassurances being given and never lived up to, and dramatic actions being taken and leading to awful tragedies or only compromised half-successes. The book really beats in the theme that if you’re really powerless and the ones fucking you over have all the cards, a lot of time there really isn’t a winning move. Well, and maybe that the heroic, principled attempts at violent resistance repeatedly got everyone involved killed but did win real concessions and aid for the other villagers who were willing to play along (or just to sell out or give up Kosawa for dead), though I’m not entirely sure that’s how the story’s intended to be read.

The prose isn’t usually eye-catching, but it’s extremely well-constructed, and beautiful at points. The story does a lot with shifting points of view, jumping from a corporate one of a particular age-group of children whose lives parallel the story, and closely individual ones from different members of a particular family whose daughter Thula ends up becoming the moral/intellectual heart of the resistance. Each voice feels incredibly distinct and focused on very different things, in a way that really worked for me. The massive timeframe covered also lets the book really indulge in showing what the day to day life of the villagers looks like – how they sustain themselves, the social rhythms of life, the rituals of adulthood, marriage, and childbirth, how widows and children are treated, and how the poisoning of the environment around them weighs down but doesn’t destroy any of it. It even does a great job of really selling the perspective and world-views of people for whom the world is enchanted and spiritual rites have real direct physical effects, which in my experience the vast majority of books about religious/spiritual characters totally fail to.

The tone of things is pretty overwhelmingly melancholic – this is a story with a deep sense of history, which also means a very tragic imagination. Characters who really dedicate themselves to trying to change the world are portrayed as deeply admirable but almost certainly doomed and even likely to cause more harm than good. You see this most prominently with Thula, whose basically a genius and devotes her entire life from childhood to activism and social change with saintly (if not near-inhuman) purity and focus, and dies in her forties having not won much at all. The ones who take what they can, get government jobs and use the opportunity to become exactly as corrupt as the men who came before them and loot the country for the benefit of their friends and families meanwhile – well, they definitely aren’t making the world any better, but they’re shown as very human and sympathetic and they mostly end up with exactly the lives they were hoping for.

#book review #clifi #literature #How Beautiful We Were #Imbolo Mbue

[morepeachyogurt]

behold the dreamers; imbolo mbue

#behold the dreamers #imbolo mbue #books #book quotes #words #exerpts #on love

[bookaddict24-7]

AUTHOR FEATURE:

﹒Imbolo Mbue﹒

Two Books Written By this Author:

Behold the Dreamers

How Beautiful We Were

___

Happy reading!

#books #bookish #booklr #bookworm #bookaholic #bibliophile #book blogger #Features #author features #author feature #black authors #diversify your shelves #on books #on reading #read #reader #reading #tbr #to-read #imbolo mbue

[bloodmaarked]

➳ monthly book round-up: april

read:

never split the difference: negotiating as if your life depended on it, chris voss + tahl raz. 5*. read 14 march 2023 – 14 april 2023.

the final strife, saara el-arifi. 4*. read 31 march 2023 – 16 april 2023.

how beautiful we were, imbolo mbue. 5*. read 16 april 2023 – 29 april 2023.

currently reading:

empress crowned in red ciannon smart. started 17 april 2023.

#monthly roundup #never split the difference #chris voss #the final strife #saara el arifi #how beautiful we were #imbolo mbue #currently reading #booklr #bookblr

[weedhorse69]

#it also bugged me a lot that the men couldnt respect an unmarried woman #or anyone for that matter #esp a childless single woman #they forced fertilized her in her sleep #i hate how womanhood is so tied to the womb #its stupid #theres more to being a girl #imbolo mbue #how beautiful we were

[jamesmurualiterary]

Imbolo Mbue is Prix Littéraire Les Afriques 2022 winner.

Imbolo Mbue is Prix Littéraire Les Afriques 2022 winner.

Imbolo Mbue’s Puissions-nous vivre longtemps was declared the winner of Prix Littéraire Les Afriques 2022 on December 21, 2022. Prix Littéraire Les Afriques is awarded annually to an African or writer of African descent who has written fiction highlighting a human, societal, ideological, political, cultural, economic, or historical issue related to Africa or its diaspora. Prix Les Afriques,…

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#Imbolo Mbue #Prix Littéraire Les Afriques #Prix Littéraire Les Afriques 2022

[eternalocean]

How Beautiful We Were Book Review

… just wow. I’ve not been so impressed with a novel in a long time. Some of the different perspectives and time hopping left me a little disoriented and confused, but I’ve never been good with books not being more or less linear. Just how my brain is. I would be curious to see if others have had that same issue. This story is fiction but I would bet that something similar has occurred in “real…

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#book review #books #colonization #fiction #Imbolo Mbue

[havewereadthis]

"Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future.

However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ façades.

When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job—even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice."

#title: behold the dreamers #author: imbolo mbue #country: usa #tumblr polls #book poll

[rockislandadultreads]

Black History Month: Fiction 

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made - and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price.

Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, 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 on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

It’s Not All Downhill From Here by Terry McMillan 

Loretha Curry’s life is full. A little crowded sometimes, but full indeed. On the eve of her sixty-eighth birthday, she has a booming beauty-supply empire, a gaggle of lifelong friends, and a husband whose moves still surprise. True, she’s carrying a few more pounds than she should be, but Loretha is not one of those women who think her best days are behind her - and she’s determined to prove wrong her mother, her twin sister, and everyone else with that outdated view of aging wrong. It’s not all downhill from here.

But when an unexpected loss turns her world upside down, Loretha will have to summon all her strength, resourcefulness, and determination to keep on thriving, pursue joy, heal old wounds, and chart new paths. With a little help from her friends, of course.

How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs

“There is a way to be cruel that seems Jamaican to me.”

Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret - Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.

In “Light Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In “Mash Up Love,” a twin’s chance sighting of his estranged brother - the prodigal son of the family - stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In “Bad Behavior,” a mother and father leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In “Mermaid River,” a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In “The Ghost of Jia Yi,” a recently murdered international student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in “Shirley from a Small Place,” a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother’s big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride 

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range.

The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride’s funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird. In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.

As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters - caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York - overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.

#black history month #black history #black authors #black stories #fiction #book recommendations #reading recommendations #book recs #reading recs #library books #TBR pile #tbr #to read #booklr #book tumblr #book blog #library blog

[literary-illuminati]

First Quarter of 2024 Book Reviews

January

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan

Monstress Volume One: Awakening by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat

The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler February

Exordia by Seth Dickinson

Montress Volume 2: The Blood by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham James

The Devourers by Indra Das

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik March

The Maya (10th Edition) by Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston

What Moves The Dead by T. Kingfisher

Victory City by Salman Rushdie

And Put Away Childish Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Vietnam: A New History by Christopher Goscha

You can also seem them all on my Goodreads

#meta #book review #2024

[notmorbid]

how beautiful we were.

dialogue prompts from how beautiful we were by imbolo mbue.

how could we have known, when they didn’t want us to know?

friendship is a great thing, isn’t it?

if you don’t do what is right, who will?

i hate this world, but i don’t want to leave it.

i want to live long and see what life after a twisted childhood looks like.

we need a good rest so we’ll be ready to face whatever tomorrow brings.

teach me how to be at home in your world.

never forget how it feels to be small, and in need of protection.

how can people not care about children?

why do women feel the need to apologize for men’s failings?

i barely have a voice left to cry with.

listening is far more enjoyable than yearning to be heard.

we’ve been waiting for one thing or another since the day we were born.

if we’ve ever needed to pray without ceasing, now is the moment.

in a way, mothers say everything while saying nothing.

please don’t make me laugh.

the people who own this country, they like it just the way it is.

isn’t it better to try and fail, than to do nothing?

a man’s anger is often just a safe haven for his cowardice.

they lied to us because they could.

you know i’m going to come back, right? i’ll never abandon you.

what happened will never unhappen, and what’s to happen will happen. better to focus on what’s in front of you.

too many things in life cannot be reconciled.

heartbreak is the worst malady.

our story cannot be left untold.

we were happy. i try not to forget that.

my patience isn’t going to last forever.

why do you have to do the fighting for everyone?

i won’t sit back and wait for someone else to take action.

i’ll go, but only if you want me to go.

what choice do we have but to go on?

from the day you were born, you’ve wanted what you’ve wanted.

you are the most spiteful child ever born.

the government doesn’t want anything but our demise.

impossibilities happen. that’s the great beauty of life.

i can’t remember the last time i saw so many stars.

i’m not you. i have to go my own way.

i’ll always be whole outside, and broken inside.

#rp prompts #rp memes #rp meme #ask meme #ask memes

[moralesmilesanhour]

...so anyways what books are u guys reading? I'm currently trying to finish 'How Beautiful We Were' by Imbolo Mbue and 'A Black Gaze: Artists Changing the Way We See' my Tina Campt :)

#i need to read more fantasy and romance but that's neither here nor there #i got assigned so many interesting books last semester that i have yet to fully read sjfhdk #blabbering

[bloodmaarked]

➸ reading list

just added:

lore of the wilds, analeigh sbrana

the unmaking of june farrow, adrienne young

want, gillian anderson

medea, rosie hewlett

like happiness, ursula villarreal-moura

the exception to the rule, christina lauren

the sellout, paul beatty

maame, jessica george

behold the dreamers, imbolo mbue

sing me to sleep, gabi burton

#lore of the wilds #analeigh sbrana #the unmaking of june farrow #adrienne young #want #gillian anderson #medea #rosie hewlett #like happiness #ursula villareal-moura #the exception to the rule #christina lauren #the sellout #paul beatty #maame #jessica george #behold the dreamers #imbolo mbue #reading list #tbr #booklr #bookblr #bookworm

[weedhorse69]

#imbolo mbue #thula #austin #he didnt deserve her imo #she would def disagree tho lol #how beautiful we were

[ebookporn]

"Students can email McSweeney’s executive director Amanda Uhle at [email protected] if they wish to be sent any of the banned books, with the titles to be shipped by independent bookstores."

#librarians #books #writers #authors #banned books #censorship #free speech #bookstores #booksellers