RaveThe New York Times Book Review... visceral ... lays a path by which we might mourn our individual traumas among the aggregate suffering of this harrowing time. Our guide, Adichie, is uncloaked, full of \'wretched, roaring rage,\' teaching us within the space of this work how to gather our disparate selves and navigate the still-raging pandemic. In doing this, she tells a global story of this moment, while mapping how her writerly voice, in particular, came to be ... \'You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language,\' she writes. Artists have tried this wrangling forever, in various mediums and states of composure. But we are better off under Adichie’s strain ... this intimate work implores, jerks us out of callousness, moves grief closer, right under our noses: Death and dying are still everywhere ... Adichie knows to train her eye on what lingers ... In the texture of many of these sentences you can almost feel where the writer has resisted bearing down with her refining tools — language and memory — so as to allow her emotional reality to remain splintered and sharp ... Naming, Adichie knows, is a powerful inheritance, and a summoning. Some of the most affecting moments are when the author uses her native tongue to call her father by various nicknames ... It is hard not to wish for more from Adichie, to know how she might contend with this loss over time, but what we have here will have to be enough for now. She is, in this work, \'callow and unformed,\' and that may be the point ... Over the course of these 30 fragments, we witness a shift in perspective, an assurance that whatever comes next will never have been created before. This may be true of Adichie’s work just as it may be true of where we all find ourselves in days to come.