RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewI finished this story collection and wondered, Is there anything Nana Nkweti can’t do? In her raucous and thoroughly impressive debut, Walking on Cowrie Shells, Nkweti writes across multiple genres including science fiction, young adult literature, literary fiction and suspense, showcasing a host of voices — immigrant and first-generation, elder and Gen Z, human and supernatural, faithful and godless — hailing from the United States and Africa ... Nkweti’s utterly original stories range from laugh-out-loud funny to heartbreaking, and are often both ... Nkweti proffers no easy solutions to the dilemmas her richly layered characters face, and she challenges our presumptions about who the villains and victims are ... This sensitivity, nuance and keen attention to history shine through on every page of the collection ... At turns tender and bold, Nkweti’s tales upend racist stereotypes. But her writing flows in such a beautiful way, and her characters’ complexities are so central, that this myth-busting feels like a byproduct and not a mission. Nkweti’s mission seems to be to have a hell of a lot of fun writing exquisite stories about people and places that matter to her. And lucky us, we get to read them. These are stories to get lost in again and again.
Cherie Jones
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWelcome to Paradise — also known as Baxter’s Beach, the Caribbean resort village at the center of Cherie Jones’s dazzling debut novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House ... in Jones’s capable hands, tension builds without diversion. The storytelling is far from breathless, but it will leave you that way: The effect is of a horrific opera in which ugliness is inevitable, but no less gutting when it appears. And in this opera, there are no minor characters. Each one, carefully and vividly crafted, has a crucial part to play ... One of Jones’s many gifts is the ability to show us flawed human beings with their humanity fully intact, to call us to examine the terrible beast within ourselves ... Jones balances the novel’s graphic violence with prose that is both evocative and wistful, haunting.
Toni Morrison
RaveThe Pittsburgh Post-GazetteMs. Morrison crafts a not-particularly-likable, but truly unforgettable character in Bride ... Ms. Morrison’s prose is leaner here than in previous novels, but still sharp and resonant with truths about love, pain, grief and family ... God Help the Child, like Ms. Morrison’s previous novels, is a book to be read twice at a minimum — the first time for the story, and the second time to savor the language, the gems of phrasing and the uncomfortable revelations about the human capacity both to love and destroy.
Darryl Pinckney
RaveThe Pittsburgh Post-Gazette“Black Deutschland travels back and forth in time and place, covering Jed’s childhood and adolescence, his adventures in Berlin, and intermittent trips back home to Chicago. Sometimes these shifts, mirroring Jed’s thoughts, happen in the same paragraph. The result is a rare intimacy with the main character that, surprisingly, does not exhaust the reader.
