MixedAsymptote\"[After reading certain passages], I wondered if McGrath’s editor had fallen asleep at the wheel ... Another oddity is his Scrabble player’s use of words—when last did you read \'flocculent\' or \'tintinnabulation\'? ... there is something about McGrath’s writing—the anecdotes that turn on hairpin bends to double back and sometimes stop abruptly, the humorist’s timing, and the sheer delight in overstatement—that manages to express something of the Sesotho language ... McGrath [tells] stories in a way that favors narrative over genre. However, a potential weakness of the text is a lack of consistent style across narratives, tending towards a multivocality that can be distracting ... [The book] is messy, often overwritten, sometimes jumbled. But above all it is joyful. McGrath tells his stories, even the tragic ones, with hope and humor—the greatest defenses against despair—writing against those characterizations of the continent that Wainaina satirized ... more often than not, [McGrath] hits the mark.\
