Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, this is the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations are made – and broken. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. But it will come at a steep price – one which generation after generation will have to pay.
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 onto its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
What has been said about Imbolo Mbue
A formidable storyteller JONATHAN FRANZEN
How Beautiful We Were will enthral you and show you what is possible when a few peoplestand up and say this is not right DAVID EBERSHOFF
Mbue has given us a book with the richness and power of a greatcontemporary fable, as heroine for our time SIGRID NUNEZ
MY REVIEW
The book How Beautiful We Were is told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thule, Thais a masterful explanation of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake ofher people’s freedom. This story exposes the effects ofcorporate greed and environmental devastation upon those who often aren’t given a voice.
I thought thisstory that’s set in a fictional African village of Kosawa is quite sad. An American oil company has caused chaos for people living in the African village.
The sky began to pour acid and the rivers began to turn green.
Many died from diseases from the poison in the water and from the poison in the air. and furthermore there was Poisoned food growing that lost its purity the day Paxton came drilling. Several of the people developed raspy coughs and rashes and fevers would deliver upon them until sadly they died.
When a meeting is gathered commotion starts, as the people in Kosawa are very angry with every child they have have buried from the poison, and furthermore they plan to show Pexton what their poison has done with one of the men who wants to show Pexton the graves of his sons who died from their poison.
A fabulous novel that is powerful with its people fighting for justice, and one story I will never forget.
About Imbolo Mbue
Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Named a notable book of the year by the Observer, New York Timesand the Washington Post and a best book of the year by close to a dozen publications, the novel has been translatedinto eleven languages, adapted into an opera and a stage play, and has been optioned for a miniseries. A nativeof Limbe, Cameroon, Mbue lives in New York City.
This does sound powerful, it’s bad enough what the American Oil companies do in this country, but what they do elsewhere, where they don’t have an EPA and other regulations is horrific.
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This does sound powerful, it’s bad enough what the American Oil companies do in this country, but what they do elsewhere, where they don’t have an EPA and other regulations is horrific.
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It’s a great fiction book, where I can completely understand it with all what goes on with the drilling everywhere.
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