MixedThe Washington PostHappily can put a spell on you: Mark’s voice is wry, honest, paranoid, angry, selfish, grateful, hopeful and antsy. She repeatedly rejects the clean, tidy stories we tell about our lives ... The sweetness of fairy tales — where princesses are awakened by a kiss, where children frolic in candy-sweet lands, where animals are anthropomorphic guides — is turned inside out through Mark’s writing, revealing a harsher side to the stories ... Mark’s reliance on the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and other fairy tale references makes her world feel tight and narrow. So, too, do the thinkers on whom she draws, among them Gertrude Stein, Carlo Levi, Samuel Beckett and Karl Marx. As expansive as these references and connections are, they never seem to pull Mark out of her own worldview. I found myself wanting — perhaps mostly for her husband and boys — some greater attention to the wider world ... There are stories there that Mark might have drawn on, and others from beyond its borders: in Anansi stories and Ghanaian folk tales, for example. But little of that finds purchase in Happily, which instead relies mostly on the more familiar structures of European narrative and thought ... The world is already terrible, which might mean that the best spells wouldn’t be those that simply reveal it in its ugliness but those that replace it with something beautiful, hopeful. Happily doesn’t quite seem capable of summoning those sentiments, reluctant as Mark seems to be to reach beyond her own kingdom of stories.
Don Lemon
MixedThe Washington PostLemon opens the book with a letter to his nephew lamenting the way the world is and the need to fight complacency in the battle against racism. It’s an intimate, tender approach that has been used with more poignancy by Black intellectuals such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ta-Nehisi Coates, Imani Perry and Kiese Laymon ... Baldwin has become the iconic shorthand and barometer for Black ethos, his work and identity forming a fundamental part of our culture. Lemon’s attempt to associate his work with the brilliance of Baldwin can only come up short. This Is the Fire is not up to the task of extending Baldwin’s legacy or vision. Ultimately, Lemon leaves me wondering who he’s speaking to—who his friends are in his subtitle. They seem to be mainly White people. That’s not shade, but it was something that sat with me as I read ... This Is The Fire does all the right things: it taps into history, the present, the anger, the hope, the energy, the sickness, the people, the places, the familiar and the unfamiliar. But it leaves me wanting more.
Nnamdi Ehrin
PositiveThe New York TimesPrince of Monkeys speaks in constant hyperbolic language; the kind where characters use adages like, \'Every problem has its own man of God ascribed to it,\' and chapters close with phrases such as, \'Always pay attention to the secrets in colors that are too terrible to be spoken aloud.\' And how could they not? Taking place in Nigeria during the 1980s and ’90s, Nnamdi Ehirim’s first novel shows us a Nigeria that exists in both fantastic and tragic terms ... Prince of Monkeysis rife with character soliloquies that relay some of the central issues of Nigerian life, then and now. Given the exhausting struggle to get by amid what feels like an uninterrupted cycle of bombings, riots and corruption, you can’t blame these characters for relentlessly remaking themselves.
