A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home.
In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results.
In “Wild,” a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground.
In "The Future Looks Good," three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in "Light," a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves.
And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person" - with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.
Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.
My Review of What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
This book is a collection of short stories which centers on female protagonists and their relationships with their parents, how they are raised and how these dynamics shape who they become.
My favorite stories from the book are Light, Wild, The future looks good, and war stories.
In Light, there is a struggle on what the child should be and not what she really wants, by both her parents.
The mother, studying for her Masters abroad, insists her daughter must appear and be in a certain way, in a way peculiar to the westerners, while the father has a conflicting opinion.
This doesn't go well with the daughter, who wants to live her life by her rules.
In Wild, a single mother who's scared her rebellious daughter would go wild if left in America, sends her to Nigeria to go stay with her aunt and cousin.
But does Nigeria really have a positive effect on her?
In War stories, a father admonishes her daughter over a game of chess and tells her stories about the war.
Her daughter, who doesn't understand the connection between her offences and the war stories, would think they don't make sense, till one day, they do.
In The future looks good, Ezimma does her best in trying to save her sister from an abusive relationship, but maybe at the end, she's the one that needs saving.
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