This is a great collection. The writing is simple and beautiful and powerful. I felt like the author was in the room telling me a story. The stories are universal, but they also taught me something about a culture and a country that I didn't know much about. ( )

A little uneven, but some stories are amazing - sharp, moving, beautiful. It's interesting to see where Okparanta was exploring some of the prominent themes from her novel in this story collection. ( )

This is a series of short stories, usually told from the perspective of the child, be that a young child or an adult child. They are all vividly set up. Sometimes I found myself being uncertain of the narrators gender until some point later in the story. They are all told in a vivid and lively manner, with much detail to provide colour and life.

My only reservation is how often domestic abuse features. In a number of the stories, the wife is being abused by the husband, be that physically or emotionally. I can't know if that is the writer's experience, or if it is a reflection of Nigerian society. Either way, I found it troubling. ( )

These short stories set in Nigeria and the US pulse with life and feeling. A great read. ( )

Yes, the stories in this collection give me a window into a culture different from my own, and that's a nice thing for a piece of fiction to do. But it isn't enough to make for excellent literature or a great reading experience. In fact, in the case of this book, it becomes a handicap as well as a virtue.

A theme running through most of these stories is that of women confronting the cultural imperative -- apparently a dominant one in Nigeria -- that marriage and childbearing are the only meaningful goals in life for a woman. These duties, along with obedience to husband and family, form the very definition of womanhood in the culture that Okparanta describes. The female characters in her stories sometimes struggle with this attitude, sometimes accept it and suffer under it, sometimes rebel against it.

But from a Western/First World perspective, this theme isn't a good scaffolding to build a book-full of stories around. For me at least, it's just too hard to feel engaged with characters struggling with something that's both so alien and so stupid. We in the West certainly have our own brands of cultural stupidity and cruelty, but not that particular one, not in that particular form. So story after story built around this theme comes to feel tiresome, just as this cultural attitude, with all the stultifying rigidity and narrow-mindedness behind it, is a tiresome and boring thing for those of us fortunate enough to regard it from a distance.

But the handicap of that cultural disconnect can't take the whole blame for holding these stories back from greatness. After all, any sort of conflict can be the basis for an exceptional story. If this collection had sufficient other qualities in its favor it could still be worthy of the highest praise, but unfortunately it doesn't, at least to my eyes. The writing is okay, but it never jumps off the page. And neither did I find any of the characters memorable or the story plots especially creative or interesting.

These stories told me things about Nigerian life and culture, but they didn't stand out for me as works of art. ( )