The Girl with the Louding Voice - Abi Daré

How do you rate a book that emotionally wrecks you with the pain caused to the main character? How can I say that I enjoyed it when Adunni is so harmed? Perhaps its Adunni's spirit, which takes so many hits but cannot be crushed or denied. That she gets up again and again and is determined to find a way to make her life better.

I am no longer surprised at the cruelty humans inflict on other humans. Our capacity to cause pain is unbounded. In The Girl with the Louding Voice, we can see how the various characters are driven to pain or compassion. How the cruelties inflicted upon them can cause irreparable harm that they then inflict on others. We can also see how the kindness of just one person can change the trajectory of another's life.

Adunni is the only daughter of her mother and father. With an older and younger brother, and living in a small Nigerian village, Adunni's mother is aware of how vitally important it is for Adunni to go to school and leave the village. She wants a better life for Adunni than she has had for herself. She sells street food in order to feed her family. Money wasted on drink by her husband. When her mother dies, Adunni is unprotected and falls victim to her family's poverty. Her husband is forced to sell her into marriage, at 15, to an older man with two wives already. Due to some tragic circumstances (yes more tragic than forced child marriage) - Adunni runs away and finds her way to Lagos, where she is sold to a family to work as a house servant.

The man who brings her to Lagos collects her pay every month and never visits. She is for all purposes, enslaved to this family. The wife of the house beats her and starves her. The father has an eye for her that is far from fatherly. And by chance she meets a neighbor who may prove her only way out. If the neighbor only has the courage to step forward and do something.

I think the portrayal of the neighbor was really honest. We all can look away from things that we don't want to get involved in. We can all suspect people who are asking for help may not have the best motives. But the neighbor here takes a chance and it literally saves Adunni's life. May we have the wisdom to see these opportunities when they come.

4/5 Stars. 

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” - Zora Neale Hurston

This is a really hard book to review. Barracoon was initially written by Hurston in the 1930s based on interviews she conducted with Kossulo (renamed Cudjo Lewis following his freedom), abducted and forced onto the Clotilda, the last ship to carry enslaved people to the United States.

Hurston insisted on maintaining Kossulo's original dialect and vernacular, one of the reasons the piece was originally rejected for publication. In the afterward, many pages are devoted to analyzing a plagiarizing issue with Hurston's earlier articles about Kossulo, mainly that she lifted entire background passages from an un-cited work. Although not mentioned, this could also be problematic in getting this later work published. 

Kossulo's story is a sad and cruel one. A teenager in Africa, his tribe is attacked by another and he is sold into slavery in 1859, at a time when the international slave trade is supposed to be outlawed. The importing of enslaved peoples to America has been prohibited but three brothers and a ship captain have decided they will run the risk. Of course, they have no qualms about accepting enslaved peoples, but when they get to America, the market has become a little dry and the brothers and ship captain end up retaining most of their "cargo." 

Not much is said by Kossulo about the time he spent enslaved aside from the loading and unloading of river ships. He does recount the day he is told he is free. And it's a stark moment because there is no where to go and he's not quite sure what he should do. But he and some other men manage to work and save and buy some land together to make their own town. He eventually marries and has six children. 

And then, tragically, his six children are killed one by one. He also loses his wife and is left bereft and lonely in Africa Town, waiting, it seems, for someone to come and listen to his story and show an interest in the life he has led. And it is interesting, and devastating. There is little redemption in the story except to say that Kossulo persisted and tried to make a life for himself, but even a life after slavery was filled with hardship and loss. 

The story of Kossulo itself garners 4 stars. The forward pieces and afterward were long on words, but somehow short on information. What became of Kossulo? What else can be said about his family or Africa Town (Plateau, AL)? I think the style of non-fiction written by journalists has developed so much over the last almost 100 years, that this story is almost unrecognizable in its current format and it left me wanting so much more. 

So this story is so important because there are so few first hand narratives of actual enslaved people. And the Clotilda represents such a dark and reprehensible period of our country's history. But I wish there was more. I wish someone had advanced Hurston the capital and independence necessary to really get the whole of Kossulo's story.

4/5 Stars

Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi

I know! A two-fer day! I actually finished these on the same day but was super lazy about writing the reviews.

Homegoing was a gut-wrenching story of love and loss over generations. Effie and Essie are half-sisters, born several years and hundreds of miles apart in Ghana. Effie, the beautiful daughter of a powerful Fanti village man is married off to a British white slave trader after her step-mother cuts off her opportunity to marry the village chief. Essie, is equally beautiful and lives in an Ashanti village and after she takes pity on the slave girl working in her home - delivering a message to the girl's father - the village is raided and Essie is sold into slavery, right under the very feet of her sister.

We then follow the varying lines of their decedents. Effie to Quay to James to Abena to Akua to Yaw to Marjorie in Ghana. Essie to Ness to Kojo to H to Willie to Sonny to Marcus in America. These varying generations have their own struggles and heartbreaks. The American line of descendants is perhaps the hardest to bear because their struggles are not their own as slavery dominates the early generations and cripples the later.

The story explores what is possibly passed down from our ancestors and how do our lineages inform and lead us to who we will be.

Incredibly well written and extremely powerful, I am so glad to have read this book.

4/5 Stars.

Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese

Cutting for Stone has been on my to-read shelf for such a long time. It's a book that came highly rated from a friend of mine who I casually stalk as to what she is reading. If she likes it, it goes on my to-read shelf. And I was not disappointed. I don't give out a five-star rating casually. I would say this wasn't quite as good as The Goldfinch (you can read that review here), but four stars just wouldn't be enough for this engrossing tale of two twin brothers, Marion and Shiva, growing up in Ethiopia during turbulent times.

Marion and Shiva are the children of a love affair between an English doctor and an Indian nun, working together at Mission hospital in Ethiopia. Their mother dies in childbirth and they are adopted by another physician at the hospital after their father's hasty departure. 

The characters in this book are so richly drawn, flawed, human. Marion and Shiva grow up on the doorsteps of the surgery and patient rooms at the hospital. It's inevitable both would pursue medical professions. A teenage rift unspools resulting in Marion's departure to the United States to complete his medical training. 

I admired the depths explored into various subjects, Ethiopian politics, surgery, Christian evangelism, the state of American medicine and safety-net hospitals. There were so many background facts that informed just who Marion and Shiva were as themselves and to each other. Beautifully written and painstakingly laid out, this book was a real pleasure. The audio version was wonderfully narrated as well.

5/5 Stars.

West with the Night - Beryl Markham

I'm shocked I'm about to write this, but I actually liked this book a bit better than Paula McClain's fictionalized account of Beryl in Circling the Sun (you can read that review here). I should add, however, that these two books are extremely different. 

I would hesitate to call West with the Night an autobiography. It is definitely a memoir and Beryl's life comes in flashes of feeling more than cold recitation of facts. I'm immensely impressed with her ability to weave a tale and create suspense, especially considering I'm more than casually familiar with her life story (even more so because she was an amateur writer). 

Perhaps reading Circling the Sun allowed me to enjoy this book more than I otherwise would, but Beryl's storytelling ability made me feel like I understood her better after reading almost 300 pages of her memories than reading almost 400 pages of a fictionalized account from her perspective. 

Perhaps the most telling parts of Beryl's book are not what she includes, but what she leaves out. The experiences she relates are singularly her own - details of her own achievements and lessons learned. There is no mention of her three husbands, of her child, or the struggles with money which took up a large portion of the other book. Here, Beryl is in full command of herself and her life - and in this way, we get a very honest picture of how she sees herself and perhaps of the person she really is. 

In the final chapter, Beryl says, "You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself." I find it extremely remarkable that Beryl wrote this book in 1942 when she was still young and had 40+ more years ahead of her. Because honestly, West with the Night provides such a complete picture of Beryl, without the aid of many concrete facts that make up her official biography. And for that, this book was a rare treasure. I completely agree with Hemingway that this is a "bloody wonderful book."

4.5/5 Stars.