WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY, stories from a new Nigerian voice

WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY: Stories
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH
Riverhead Books
$26 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU!

My Review: There is so much more here than the slenderness of the volume they inhabit would indicate; hence the perfection of my use of the Bryce Method to give you a quick hit of my ideas of a story, and then show individual ratings.

The Future Looks Good if you aren't paying attention, anyway. The fact is that you get yourself into places you really don't want to be because of the past:

...Ezinma, keys fumbling against the lock, doesn't see what came behind her: her mother at age twenty-two, not beautiful, but with the fresh look of a person who has never been hungry.
–and–
He blinds {Ezinma's sister} with a constellation of gifts, things she's never had before, like spending money and orgasms.

And, in the end, it's never really you that they want, Ezinma, it's not the way of the world for a kindly, accepting soul to be given the Keys to the Kingdom. There are locks and doors and living spaces that you are not made for, and going there is fatal. 4 bitter stars

War Stories remembers the tack one's parents take to Educate and Enlighten you...

"Is this about the time {your c.o.} took your gun?"

The tale, intended to impart some inscrutable lesson, was a stale one my father had trotted out at various infractions over my short life. I heard it when I stole lipstick from my aunt's dresser. I heard it when my mother discovered me gathering ants in a plastic bag to put in a schoolmate's hair. I heard it after I got into a fight with the children who said my father was strange, and again when I wanted to know why {father's best friend} couldn't come to our house anymore, and later, why he'd done what he'd done. My father never shared stories from before or after the war, as though he'd been born in the barracks and died the night of the final volley.

We're on to your tricks, Parents! Why do you use this creaky, crappy, ineffectual technique...that I still remember...oh.

The truth of stories has power. The telling of truths through stories is an act of creation and annihilation, a bright flash of the Universe's unfiltered energy come to Earth for the merest moment. And no one near leaves unchanged. 4.5 stars

Wild

Light

Second Chances

Windfalls

Who Will Greet You at Home

Buchi's Girls

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is the first of these stories I read, back when it was a finalist for the 2016 Caine Prize. My review is here.

Glory

What is a Volcano?

Redemption