Review
I got stumped last year trying to review this book.
On the heels of Oprah's announcement that
Say
You're One of Them would be her next book club
pick, I looked back on my abandoned draft. I see two
paragraphs with an "x" marked through them, and
written at the bottom:
I'm afraid I don't have
the right adjectives to review this book.
Unspeakable things happen to children in these
stories, awful things we know are happening to
actual children in the real world. It's hard to
explain, then, why anyone should want to read them.
The best I can come up with is that these stories
aren't about the unspeakable things that happen, but
how these children survive them. It's a small shift,
but an important one, and it's the very thing that...
Beyond the Book
Uwem Akpan was born in Ikot Akpan Eda in southern
Nigeria. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003
and received his MFA in creative writing from the
University of Michigan in 2006.
He started writing fiction during his seminary days,
at night when the community computers were free but
he lost much of his work to viruses.
Eventually, a friend gave him a laptop which, in his
own words, 'saved me from the despair of losing my
stories and made me begin to see God again in the
seminary.'
"My Parents'
Bedroom", a story included in...
