Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Forna (Happiness) explores notions of place, identity, and movement in this bracing collection. In vignettes and long-form essays, she describes traveling through Mali; England, where she went to school; Sierra Leone, where she spent much of her childhood; and the U.S. In the title essay, Forna recalls flying as an unaccompanied minor, with maternal stewardesses and a heroic captain: "For six hours we lived inside the perfect patriarchy." "Obama and the Renaissance Generation" captures the difference between an African and an American perspective on Barack Obama as she traces her own father's history. The essays flit from childhood to adulthood and from place to place, which can at times be disorienting--the shorter essays, such as "Ice," a three-page meditation on an ice skating performance, offer a welcome change of pace. Forna is a razor sharp prose stylist (airplanes, for example, are "like a galloping draught horse that, through sheer determination, somehow succeeds in clearing the oncoming fence"), and her attention to detail moves the collection forward, as in "Technicals," in which she examines emotional responses to war vehicle model names: "Defender. Patrol. These names invoke violence, force." Full of careful observations, Forna's meditations hit the mark. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In this collection of essays, novelist Forna (The Memory of Love) touches on travel, trauma, and family. It reads as a sort of nonlinear memoir that tells stories of her mixed Scottish and Sierra Leonian family and her travels between Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Forna reflects on her life and her work as she moves through these different cultures and encounters situations both good and difficult. She discusses race, misogyny, poverty, and environmentalism, in witty and poetic prose. While some essays are many pages long, highly detailed, and quite serious, others incorporate humor and humility in more precise language on fewer pages. The varied essay lengths give readers time to breathe in between, before they embark on another of Forna's adventures, whether that's discussing her sleep patterns (or lack thereof), her interactions with a legendary ape of Sierra Leone named Bruno, or civil war. VERDICT These essays are raw, informative, and often entertaining; fans of essayists like Roxane Gay will devour this book quickly and be left wanting more of Forna's stories.--Natalie Browning, Longwood Univ. Lib., Farmville, VA
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The award-winning Sierra Leonean novelist looks at her life through multiple lenses. "I love to fly….I love the drama of the takeoff. The improbability of the whole endeavor." With this endearing admission, Forna inaugurates her first nonfiction work since The Devil That Danced on the Water (2002), which chronicled her search for the truth about her father's execution in Sierra Leone in 1974. This collection ranges across topics as varied as colonialism, childhood memories, and chimpanzees. Her gaze takes in big events like Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the Trump inauguration, but she's at her best when coaxing hard-won wisdom out of everyday details. "Sleep is a political issue," she declares in an essay about insomnia, noting how 18th-century Parisians would smash streetlamps to protest the conditions of sleep forced on them by the government. Forna glides smoothly among memoir, travel writing, history, and literary studies. The prose is intimate and conversational--"I do not have resting bitch face"--but the feeling of chatting over coffee belies the attention she gives to each sentence. Travel is ubiquitous in the text. Marveling at her mother's experiences--she "has lived in nineteen countries on five continents….In between she has visited dozens more, taking in new countries year by year"--the author can barely go a page without mentioning a vacation to Thailand, a road trip through Death Valley, a winter in Tehran, and, of course, many trips to Sierra Leone. Everything is defined by roots, from Lebanese tourists to a Sri Lankan former banker to Croatian Nikola Tesla to the Kenyan ancestry of Barack Obama. Of the migrant population in her mother's ancestral Shetland Islands, Forna writes: "The question 'Where do you come from?' is not followed by the spoken or silent 'originally,' but the word 'now.' " Caught between worlds, Forna prefers to see them all from above, no doubt while on the plane to her next destination. A grand sweep of peoples and cultures united by a longing for what home really means. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
