Review by chaostalking - The Goddess of Mtwara and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2017

2.5

Didn't love this particular anthology overall, but I wanted to highlight my favourite stories here:

"Shells" by Lesley Nneka Arimah — 5 stars: Short, concise, perfectly spooky-dooky. What a whirlwind of controlled writing. I’m imagining a lot of these workshop-originated pieces were written and workshopped quite quickly, so it’s great to see such such a strong work among them. Sharp prose, wonderful mythology, and a wonderfully paced development of the relationships between the main character and her sister and ex. The ending is a foregone conclusion but still. HITS. I can't wait to get my hands on Arimah's short story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky.
"God's Children Are Little Broken Things" by Arinze Ifeakandu — 4,5 stars: The story juggles so much and threads them together masterfully. The writing is intimate in its sparseness, and this is one of those rare examples in which the lack of quotation marks doesn’t just work for me, but actually elevates the story (it’s typically not a device I appreciate at all, much less think makes the story stronger). The main character has such dynamic relationships with everyone in the story, and the way those relationships push and pull against one another for the main character is so rewarding. And that ending? GUTTURAL.