A witty, oblique and mischievous storyteller, Arimah can compress a family history into a few pages and invent utopian parables, magical tales and nightmare scenarios while moving deftly between comic distancing and insightful psychological realism ... As in most collections, a few entries are less successful, but throughout Arimah demonstrates a deft wit and an ability to surprise herself — and her readers — with the depth and delicacy of her feelings ... Arimah’s magic realism owes something to Ben Okri’s use of spirit beliefs, while her science fiction parables, with their ecological and feminist concerns, recall those of Margaret Atwood. But it would be wrong not to hail Arimah’s exhilarating originality: She is conducting adventures in narrative on her own terms, keeping her streak of light, that bright ember, burning fiercely, undimmed.
...[a] remarkable debut collection ... Of all of Arimah's considerable skills, this might be her greatest: She crafts stories that reward rereading, not because they're unclear or confusing, but because it's so tempting to revisit each exquisite sentence, each uniquely beautiful description ... Arimah's collection somehow manages to be both cohesive and varied at the same time. None of the stories resemble one another, exactly, but they manage to form a book united not only by theme and by setting (the stories mostly take place in Nigeria and the U.S.), but by Arimah's electrifying, defiantly original writing. It's a truly wonderful debut by a young author who seems certain to have a very bright literary future ahead of her.
...[an] electrifying debut ... These are designed to leave marks. With its fluid blend of dark humor, sorrow, and excursions into magic realism, some of Arimah’s stories feel like a jazzy cross between Octavia Butler and Shirley Jackson. Yet there is nothing derivative here ... In this sharp, meticulous collection, Arimah is more concerned with the ways, for better or worse, people try to navigate love, the meaning of home, and the hard corners of their lives.
Arimah’s endings are frequently ambiguous. Freedom is not always synonymous with happiness, and sometimes her characters fail in their attempts at forging their own paths. These characters are both foolish and mighty. They may not really know what they’re doing, but they’re tough and they won’t back down. In our current political climate with its rampant animosity towards immigrants, Arimah offers a humanizing portrait of both the Nigerian citizen and first generation young female immigrant. She showcases their flaws, their desires, their victories, and their attempts at carving out a place in a country whose customs and values diverge from that of their heritage.
Arimah is a skillful storyteller who can render entire relationships with just a few lines of dialogue ... Despite its themes of grief and loss, Arimah’s prose is not without humor. In 'Redemption,' a girl regards her father’s mistress: 'She always wore yellow, and she looked pretty in it. Not abandon-your-only-legitimate-child pretty, but you could see what a man would see in her.' In the stunning titular story — set in a future many decades from the present — human wrists are marked to indicate class and parents’ occupation, and 'Mathematician' takes on a new, transcendent meaning.
Arimah is particularly interested in generational rifts. Warnings go unheeded by young and old, and the best laid plans are defied; adolescent rebellion yields harsh punishment ... the best stories in the book plumb the depths of human desire and delusions without magic ... A spirit of willful perseverance suffuses Arimah’s collection, too, and pulls it back from the brink of total bleakness. Above all, her writing conveys respect for the people who claw their way through relentlessly difficult lives.
...[a] powerful and incisive debut collection ... Arimah gracefully inserts moments of levity into each tale and creates complex characters who are easy to both admire and despise. From the chilling opening story, 'The Future Looks Good,' structured like a Russian nesting doll, to the closing story, 'Redemption,' this collection electrifies.
The 12 short stories of Lesley Nneka Arimah’s debut collection, What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, are beautiful gut punches. Surprising, swift and vivid ... the range of What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky is expansive, and Arimah is as comfortable in the recognizable world of realist fiction as she is playing with genre ... This is essential reading from an exciting new writer.
...mothers and daughters, aunts and sisters are central to this collection. In some stories, their relationships will break your heart. 'Windfalls,' a story about women just getting by in America with a mix of deception and desperation, feels raw and true. It’s difficult to read and yet impossible to turn away. This is a slim, rare volume that left me compelled to press it into the hands of friends, saying, 'You must read this.' But resist the urge to make your way through its pages at a rapid clip. Each story here benefits from reflection before you tackle the next.
One of the pleasures of reading Lesley Nneka Arimah’s debut collection is the feeling of being thrown off balance: not knowing where this playful and adventurous new talent will take you next ... Arimah’s focus is on the lives of girls and women, and while her perspective is often bleak, the collection is bracing and varied ...a debut writer showing serious range – drawing on realism, magical realism, the fantastic and speculative, myth and fable ... The seam of bleakness running through the book concerns the diminishment of women: an outcome which starts to appear almost inevitable, even for girls born brave and quick-witted... While at times her use of narrative or rhetorical devices brings a degree of self-consciousness to the page, it also brings energy, momentum and humour ... Here, and elsewhere, Arimah captures a sense of time and change as chaotic, fast and unsparing – slippery, and out of our hands.
Arimah has skill in abundance: the stories here are solid and impeccably crafted and strike at the heart of the most complicated of human relationships. Against a backdrop of grief for dead parents or angst over a lover, Arimah uses Nigeria as her muse ... This speculative turn joins everything from fabulism to folk tale as Arimah confidently tests out all the tools in her kit while also managing to create a wholly cohesive and original collection. Heralds a new voice with certain staying power.
...a slender yet mighty short story collection that delivers one head-snapping smack after another ... Like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, she writes with subtlety and poignancy about the struggles of love and hope between daughters and mothers and fathers, including relationships complicated by the legacy of the Biafran War, class divides, and transatlantic separations ... Arimah’s stories of loss, grief, shame, fury, and love are stingingly fresh and complexly affecting.
The title story in this slender collection is as devastating as it is clever ... Arimah’s stories are witty, poetic and searing, full of flawed-but-lovable characters and images that make you reread passages. The author has a keen sense of fantasy and the absurd, but her work is rooted in experiences and impulses that will seem all too familiar.
Sometimes the hype around a highly anticipated title makes me skeptical. This short story collection by Lesley Nneka Arimah silenced that cranky inner cynic and instead gave me something to celebrate ... Her sentences often seem to teeter on the brink of collapse, but then are revealed to be soundly constructed. When I finished, I paused to connect the dots, marveled at the relationship of the past to the present.
