How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
This is a heartbreaking novel, portraying the destruction of a town and a way of life when an American oil company arrives to drill in an African country. This is a sweeping story that crosses oceans and lifetimes told from multiple points of you. At first I was skeptical because of the ratio of expository writing to scene, but Mbue unfolds this story over time using her various voices and points of view. The novel begins in the pov of the children – a sacred and vulnerable body that grow older and more hardened as the novel comes to a close. This novel is a reminder that the negative impacts of capitalism and a colonialist mindset are not limited to the land and people in the target country, but to the Western power, in this case the United States.
About How Beautiful We Were:
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.
Read more of Jeannie’s Reviews on her blog, on Goodreads or StoryGraph, or on the New York Journal of Books. For more TBR inspiration, check out Jeannie’s curated book lists at Bookshop.org.
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