How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

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 a 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 Imbolo 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 Imbolo 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. The village loses their traditions and ancestral place as their 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 Imbolo 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 to protect our children here in America.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

How Beautiful We Were
by Imbolo Mbue
Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 9780593132425
hard cover $28.00 (USD)

from the publisher:

We should have known the end was near. So begins 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.

Miracle Country by Kendra Atleework

The Eastern Sierra is a land of wild winds and wildfires. In 1892, Mary Austin arrived at the Eastern Sierra and wrote, "You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God."

Once Paiute harvested fields of wild rye and love grass, before ranchers arrived to summer their stock. The cattle devoured the crops and the First People starved. Bill Mulholland stole lake water to grow Los Angeles. Drought depletes the wells while the streams are diverted to LA.

A woman from the Great Lakes and a man from the California coast were drawn to the sublimity of the high desert. They met in a band and went on a hike. They birthed two girls and adopted a brown-skinned son.

It's hard to know how to fix a smashed world at sixteen, at fourteen, at eleven.~ from Miracle Country by Kendra Atleework

Their idyllic life was smashed with their matriarch's early death, spiraling the children into their private hells from which their father could not save them.

Atleework left for LA and then the MidWest. The hills burned. The dust blew arsenic. Her father's well dried up. But the beauty of Atleework's homeland brought her back from her wanderings.

Whiskey's for drinking. Water's for fighting over.~from Miracle Country by Kendra Attleework

The environmental cost for the growth of cities is central to the story and raises ethical questions about water rights. "We live in a landscape damaged beyond repair," Atleework writes, "and we see our loss magnified the world over."

The story of water in Owens Valley...was a sad story of wrong done, a near tall tale with a suit-coated villian and cowboy herons. ~from Miracle Country by Kendra Atleework

The valley's discovery by American soldiers and the settlers eager to displace (or annihilate) the native people is the story of European attitudes that 'built' the country while also destroying it.

Atleework's Miracle Country was a pleasure to read, gorgeous in prose, intimate as a memoir, and wide-ranging in its portrait of a land and its people. Highly recommended.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Miracle Country: A Memoir
by Kendra Atleework
Algonquin Books
Pub Date: July 14, 2020 
ISBN: 9781616209988
hardcover $27.95 (USD)

from the publisher:

Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero.

Kendra’s parents taught their children to thrive in this beautiful, if harsh, landscape, prone to wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Above all, they were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. After Kendra’s mother died of a rare autoimmune disease when Kendra was just sixteen, however, her once beloved desert world came to feel empty and hostile, as climate change, drought, and wildfires intensified. The Atleework family fell apart, even as her father tried to keep them together. Kendra escaped to Los Angeles, and then Minneapolis, land of tall trees, full lakes, water everywhere you look. 

But after years of avoiding her troubled hometown, she realized that she needed to come to terms with its past and present and had to go back. Miracle Country is a moving and unforgettable memoir of flight and return, emptiness and bounty, the realities of a harsh and changing climate, and the true meaning of home.

 For readers of Cheryl Strayed, Terry Tempest Williams, and Rebecca Solnit, this is a breathtaking debut by a remarkable writer.  

How Beautiful We Were by Mbolo Mbue

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 a 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. The village loses their traditions and ancestral place as their 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 to protect our children here in America.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

from the publisher:

We should have known the end was near. So begins 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.

How Beautiful We Were
by Imbolo Mbue
Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 9780593132425
hard cover $28.00 (USD)

What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City by Mona Hanna-Attisha

This is the story of the most important and emblematic environmental and public health disaster of this young century. Most bluntly, it is the story of a government poisoning its own citizens, and then lying about it. [...]this is also a story about the deeper crises we're facing right now in our country: a breakdown in democracy; the disintegration of critical infrastructure due to inequality and austerity; environmental injustice that disproportionately affects the poor and black; the abandonment of civic responsibility and our deep obligations as human beings to care and provide for one another. Along with all that--which is a lot already--it's about a bizarre disavowal of honesty, transparency, good government, and respect for scientific truth. ~from What the Eyes Don't See by  Mona Hanna-Attisha

What the Eyes Don't See is a riveting read. Hanna-Attisha is a pediatrician at Hurley Hospital in Flint, MI. Her narrative of how she discovered rising levels of blood in her pediatric patients and her battle to bring justice to the disenfranchised people of Flint is inspiring and maddening.

She describes her anguish and determination to save the children of Flint, how it disrupted her private and family life, and the brick walls and rejection she faced. Thankfully, she was stubborn and determined.

The callousness of political leaders toward the people of Flint as unimportant and expendable is despicable.

Flint falls right into the American narrative of cheapening black life.~from What the Eyes Don't See by Mona Hanna-Attisha

Readers are given a history of Flint's rise as an automotive manufacturing hub, and when jobs left, its decline to becoming one of the state's most impoverished cities.

The budget-cutting changes implemented under an appointed Emergency Manager explains how the lead-poisoned water came to be and how officials lied about the poisoned water.

If I had to locate an exact cause of the crisis, above all others, it would be the ideology of extreme austerity and "all government is bad government".~from What the Eyes Don't See by Mona Hanna-Attisha

Dr. Hanna-Attisha called out Senator Debbie Stabenow as an early and important supporter of her goals. The daughter of a nurse, and a former social worker, Senator Stabenow has a commitment to public health. She was part of a team that brought federal aid to Flint and the availability of premixed infant formula so Flint mothers did not need to use the lead-contaminated water.

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha is a local heroine. I am proud to say that she was a graduate of Royal Oak Kimball High School, my alma mater. Her family came to Michigan for education but remained in exile from their homeland after the takeover by Saddam Hussein and the Iraq wars. Dr. Hanna-Attisha first became an activist with a Kimball environmental group.

I read an ebook through the local public library.