We Need New Names
Darling is only 10 years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school...
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Darling is only 10 years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad.But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her--from Zadie Smith to Monica Ali to J.M. Coetzee--while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9780316230810 (0316230812)
ASIN: 316230812
Publish date: May 21st 2013
Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books
Pages no: 298
Edition language: English
Category:
Novels,
Literature,
Cultural,
Africa,
Book Club,
Adult Fiction,
Historical Fiction,
Literary Fiction,
Adult,
Contemporary,
African Literature
We Need New Names is a lush, language-rich narration by a young African girl who gradually becomes an expat in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The narrator's voice has a wonderful innocence, even as she and her playmates (I'd say schoolmates but the teachers have all left the country and the school closed) pl...
I hated this book. It was tolerably written. It was just so, so, I can't find the word...smugly pleased with its dreary on-trendness...oh yeah, HIP! That's the word. Hip. http://tinyurl.com/m4h3ns9 Last year's Book Prize panel put this one on the map. I genuinely do not know why it was on any of...
3.5 stars, maybe four - well worth a read. I’m sometimes skeptical of child narrators, but Darling is an effective protagonist; her raw, matter-of-fact depiction of her childhood in Zimbabwe casually contrasts her innocent curiosity and the games she and her friends play with the violence they encou...
Linked short stories generally follow Darling, a Zimbabwean girl, from her hungry, conflict-saturated childhood in Africa to her dislocated/relocated young adulthood in the U.S. Most of the sections worked well, though the end point of some didn't resonate or satisfy. There are some intrusions of a ...
Occasionally, I come across a book that is difficult for me to say much about. I finish the book, put it aside, scratch my head as I try to piece together what it is exactly I feel about what I just read. Obviously, I didn't love it, but I also didn't hate it. It just didn't resonate with me and I c...
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