Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Chigozie Obioma, you broke my heart

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma

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CBR15 BINGO: Africa, because the author was born in Nigeria, and the story takes place in Nigeria Double BINGO! Horizontal: Dwelling, Africa, Relation”ship”, Violence, On the Air Diagonal: South America, Africa, North America, Asia & Oceania, Europe With 20 pages left to read in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen, I suddenly felt a dread about finishing. In spite of tragedy striking at barely the half-way mark of the novel, I still clung to the hope that things could turn out well; yet, all along, I knew […]

“They were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join this universal orchestra, in which all there was to do was cry and wail.”

An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma

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CBR12 BINGO: UnCannon BINGO: UnCannon, Nostalgia, Yellow, Happy, Repeat The description for the “UnCannon” category in CBR12 Bingo advises the reader to “Challenge yourself as much as you are able.” So while I could have picked up any book by a female author (of which there are many on my TBR list) to satisfy this category, I chose to read something by 34-year-old Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma. My husband read An Orchestra of Minorities last year and raved about it, so I decided now would […]

A parable of Nigeria

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#CBR10bingo #Backlog — published in 2015, this has been in my stack for three years! The Fishermen, Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma’s debut novel, was nominated for a Man Booker prize. His second novel is due early next year. Set in the town Akure, Nigeria in the mid-1990s, The Fishermen is the story of four brothers whose lives are upended in a tragically short period of time. This novel has the feel of a parable, or of a very grim fairy tale. It has a dark […]

The Fishermen: a faint nipple on the debut book horizon

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I had the immense pleasure of watching the author speak. Obiama is an incredibly charming, humble and wellspoken man and it is with great regret that his debut novel is nothing more that mediocre. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The novel is warm and full of faults and tiny promises. But it is also a novel in dire need of editing. Too many strands of plot got in the way of the story, overly flourish prose stilted the pace, and somehow still made […]

A haunting debut novel

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As you know, I’m still reading books by authors from other countries as a means of enriching my curriculum. While my reading list is already set for this fall’s literature course, I am obviously building materials for future courses. On one of our weekly library trips, The Chancellor scouted this novel out. Correction: that would be a bi-weekly trip. Teachers on summer vacation get WILD. Anyway, this sounded really interesting, so I decided to check it out, hoping it wouldn’t disappoint me the way The […]



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