PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...one of the few creative works about the Somali conflict that doesn’t center on the downed Black Hawk helicopter and the 18 Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos who died trying to capture the warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid ... Eck has served in the military in Somalia, and the strongest aspect of this novel is his ability to bring us straight into the devastation, all its sights and sounds whirling around us as they whirl around Stantz and his comrades ... Eck’s writing could also use more rhythm, and more emotional emphasis. Sometimes awkward and stilted, his prose can stumble over itself ... The mental landscapes Eck’s characters inhabit are mostly two-dimensional, and the reader keeps hoping to see both the Americans and the Somalis as more than mere victims of circumstance.
NoViolet Bulawayo
MixedThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewBulawayo’s portrayal of Zimbabwe is notable not for its descriptions of Paradise and Budapest but for those of Darling’s interior landscape — when, for example, she compares camera-toting NGO workers snapping pictures of her friends to paparazzi harassing Paris Hilton, or when she observes that in Zimbabwe you need to be a grandfather to be president, unlike America’s youthful Obama. Sometimes Darling is afraid of her world, which can be both disgusting and beguiling, but she is sure of her place in it … The more Darling becomes an American, the less vibrant Bulawayo’s writing becomes...And yet, despite the course of the latter half of the novel, Bulawayo is clearly a gifted writer.
