GraceLand

I have mixed feelings about this book and while I’m glad I read it, it’s a difficult book to recommend to anyone. I’d say one of the main weaknesses is an inconsistency in tone throughout the book. Abani veers all over the place and the book alternates between passages that are broadly satirical and......more

I found the premise of this book intriguing, its protagonist being a 16 year old Elvis impersonator who lives in a 1983 Lagos slum. What initially appears like a comic premise soon reveals itself to be the misplaced aspirations of a motherless teenager named after the king whose act involves him dus......more

In the very first scene of the book, when the protagonist Elvis is awoken by a pounding Nigerian rainstorm, we read this: The book he had fallen asleep reading, Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man", fell from his side to the floor, the old paperback cracking at the spine, falling neatly into two halves as......more

This book is one of those books that, no matter how intense and devastating its content, is written so well that you just don't want it to end. Abani's prose is so effortless and fluid, you can't help but be drawn into the world he's created. In this case, Lagos, Nigeria in the early 1980s, with fla......more

This was one of the most exhausting, over-written, and absurd books I have ever read. If it wasn't required reading for a class I would have put it down in the first few pages. This is the fourth novel I have read about the Biafran Civil War/its aftermath, and by far the worst. I'm not saying it's o......more