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mattdube 's review for:
A Kind of Madness
by Uche Okonkwo
A collection of mostly realistic stories set in Nigeria, where it seems the rural village life is mostly supplanted by urban living, but not entirely. Nearly all of the stories, maybe all, are centered around kids, somewhere between 7 and 12, and I'm not usually a big fan of stories about kids; I don't find innocence all that interesting. But these stories rarely leave the kids alone-- most of them are about I guess you'd call it generational strife, conflicts between young people and the adults in their lives, which turns out about as well as you'd expect. There's some arbitrary displays of power, which definitely jives with the way I think about childhood.
The best stories are at the end of the book-- "The Girl Who Lied" and "Milk and Oil" deal a little more than the others with how kids respond to each other, and that had some spark. "Burning," the last story here, does lean a little into the suffering of innocence, but in the context of parental mental illness, which was striking and terrifying.
A decent collection, just not totally my thing.
The best stories are at the end of the book-- "The Girl Who Lied" and "Milk and Oil" deal a little more than the others with how kids respond to each other, and that had some spark. "Burning," the last story here, does lean a little into the suffering of innocence, but in the context of parental mental illness, which was striking and terrifying.
A decent collection, just not totally my thing.