A fearless young woman from a small African village starts a revolution against an American oil company in this sweeping, inspiring novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Behold the Dreamers.“Mbue reaches for the moon and, by the novel’s end, has it firmly held in her hand.”—NPR We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price.
Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
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How Beautiful We Were will enthrall you, appall you, and show you what is possible when a few people stand up and say, ‘This is not right.’ It is a masterful novel by a spellbinding writer engaged with the most urgent questions of our day.
Imbolo Mbue has given us a novel with the richness and power of a great contemporary fable, and a heroine for our time.
Imbolo Mbue is a storyteller of astonishing gifts. How Beautiful We Were reminds me of how interconnected we remain, no matter who or where we are.
Tragic story of life in unnamed African village. Bad choices are made when people are desperate and the sad story has an appropriate sad ending. This is not an easy read but it is worth it. Giant corporation steals and poisons the village. Villagers try to gain some control of their lives.
Read it anyhow, it’s worth it. I am not sure what “great world building” means but you will learn about another part of the world and how the people are treated in many cases.
Uninspired
This novel is a woven story, told from the perspective of many points of view, all centered around a fictional African village. The village, taken over in every practical sense by an oil company, struggles to regain its ancestral land and keep its children from dying from the poisonous water. Over the course of the novel, Mbue takes the reader on a journey not just through one generation, but many, as the aftereffects of this environmental and capitalist overreach wreak havoc. The story mainly centers on a girl named Thula, who holds the hopes and fears of all of the village with her.
I was immediately grabbed by this novel, its first grounding perspective told in a first person plural, “we, the children” as they watch a horrific event. From there, I couldn’t put this novel down and resented each time I had to. Passionate, lush prose. Glad to have read it.
This novel is a triumph. The language is glorious, the plot captivating, the setting vibrant, the characters deeply human. The story is revealed layer by layer, with subplots that bring the community to life even as a man-made ecological disaster slowly destroys it. Reminiscent of THE GRAPES OF WRATH, this novel is what literary fiction should be.
Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.
One angry woman did everything, and she failed.~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
I read Imbolo Mbue’s first novel Behold the Dreamers as a galley and for book club. I jumped at the chance to read her second novel, How Beautiful We Were.
Was money so important that they would sell children to strangers seeking oil?~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
The novel is about an African village struggling for environmental justice, powerless, caught between an American oil company and a corrupt dictatorship government.
They are proud people, connected to the land of their ancestors. They have lived simple, subsistence lives, full of blessings. Until the oil company ruined their water, their land, their air. A generation of children watch their peers dying from poisoned water. Their pleas for help are in vain.
School-aged Thula is inspired by books, including The Communist Manifesto, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and The Wretched of the Earth. “They were her closest friends,” spurring her into activist causes when she goes to America to study. In America and becomes an activist. Meanwhile, her peers in her home village lose faith in the process and take up terrorism.
How could we have been so reckless as to dream?~from How Beautiful We Were by Mbolo Mbue
The fictional village, its inhabitants and history, is so well drawn I could believe it taken from life. The viewpoint shifts among the characters.
We wondered if America was populated with cheerful people like that overseer, which made it hard for us to understand them: How could they be happy when we were dying for their sake?~from How Beautiful We Were by Mbolo Mbue
The fate of the village and its country are an indictment to Western colonialism and capitalism. Slaves, rubber, oil–people came and exploited Africa for gain. (And of course, it was not just Africa…) In the end, they lose their traditions and ancestral place as the children become educated and take jobs with Western corporations and the government.
This story must be told, it might not feel good to all ears, it gives our mouths no joy to sat it, but our story cannot be left untold.~from How Beautiful We Were by Mbolo Mbue
This is not an easy book for an American to read. It reminds us of the many ways our country has failed and continues to fail short of the ideal we hope it is. And not just abroad–we have failed our children here in America.
I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.