About The Book
A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home.
In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In “Wild,” a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In “The Future Looks Good,” three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in “Light,” a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to “fix the equation of a person” – with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.
Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.
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Book Review
“You shouldn’t be stopping a person from feeling natural hardships. That’s what it means to be human.”
― Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
What it means when a man falls from the sky is a collection of stories about Families, Parents and their Children, the good parent and the bad children and vice versa.
I would say my best story out of all the stories was the one of the girl who was made to come home by her mother from the US to come and stay with her cousin and aunt in Lagos, Nigeria. It was an unexpected twist when her supposedly goody-two-shoes cousin, who was supposed to be a church girl who obeyed her mother, turned out to be a single mother and party rocker with an I-don’t-care attitude and a rather object of shame to her mother. It also opened the girl to the reality that though she and her mother have their misunderstandings, they still had a better relationship than that of her aunt and cousin.
There were also interesting stories, more like fantasy stories of a society where children her made out of anything —wool, trashy, hair, wood— anything, and a woman’s worth and credibility was measured by how special her child was. One lesson I learnt from this story is that one should never live their life based on what other people say about them, because when things get bad, you will be left to face it on your own.
The part I least enjoyed, one of the short story titled What it means when a man falls from the sky, it left me a little lost at the beginning and the middle part was just there, then the end took me by surprise, by the time I grasped it, it was too late, it became a situation of me not knowing how to react to the story.
Every one of the stories left me with hangovers like most short stories do, but I really loved their storylines.
l give this book 4.2 ⭐⭐⭐⭐?stars
Glossary
Hollowed
formed by making a hole, having a space or cavity inside; not solid; empty: a hollow sphere. having a depression or concavity: a hollow surface. sunken, as the cheeks or eyes.
Ember
small live piece of coal, wood, etc., as in a dying fire. embers, the smoldering remains of a fire.
Permutations
A permutation, also called an “arrangement number” or “order,” is a rearrangement of the elements of an ordered list into a one-to-one correspondence with itself.
Escalate
Increase rapidly ; make or become more intense or serious.
Dimmed
make or become less bright or distinct. make or become less intense; lower the beam of (a vehicle’s headlights) to avoid dazzling oncoming drivers.
Excessive
more than is necessary, normal, or desirable; immoderate.
-Sara
