What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

Starred review from February 27, 2017
In her powerful and incisive debut collection, Arimah shuttles between continents and realities to deliver 12 stories of loss, hope, violence, and family relationships. In “Wild,” a reckless teenage girl is sent from America to her aunt in Nigeria, only to get caught up in the life of her equally reckless cousin. “Second Chances” sees a deceased mother magically reappear in her family’s life, with mixed results, and “Buchi’s Girls” is about a widow struggling to raise two daughters while living in her sister’s house. Mother and daughter grifters deal with an unexpected pregnancy in “Windfalls,” while the collection’s futuristic title story explores a world in which mathematicians have unlocked the secrets to all humanity, allowing humans to remove emotional pain from others and disrupt the laws of nature. Arimah gracefully inserts moments of levity into each tale and creates complex characters who are easy to both admire and despise. From the chilling opening story, “The Future Looks Good,” structured like a Russian nesting doll, to the closing story, “Redemption,” this collection electrifies.

Starred review from February 1, 2017
Nigeria serves as a prism refracting the myriad experiences of both former and current inhabitants.In two different stories in Arimah's debut collection, characters have the supernatural ability to drain emotions from other people, for good or for ill. In "Who Will Greet You at Home," a Nigerian woman participates in a tradition of making children out of inanimate materials and having them blessed by older women in hopes that they will become real. But these blessings come at a price--in her case, "Mama" blesses the child in exchange for the protagonist's own joy, "siphoned a bit, just a dab...a little bit of her life for her child's life." In the title story, figures known as Mathematicians are able to use precise algorithms and equations to relieve negative emotions from customers who can afford it. This power over feelings is as good a metaphor as any for storytelling. And Arimah has skill in abundance: the stories here are solid and impeccably crafted and strike at the heart of the most complicated of human relationships. Against a backdrop of grief for dead parents or angst over a lover, Arimah uses Nigeria as her muse. The characters exist in relation to a Nigeria of the past--the ghost of the Nigerian civil war, especially, looms over many of the stories--as well as present-day Nigeria, either as citizens or expats. Arimah even imagines a future Nigeria in which it has become the "Biafra-Britannia Alliance" in a massive geopolitical shift resulting from devastating climate change. This speculative turn joins everything from fabulism to folk tale as Arimah confidently tests out all the tools in her kit while also managing to create a wholly cohesive and original collection. Heralds a new voice with certain staying power.

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Starred review from March 15, 2017
Arimah, a young writer of the UK, Nigeria, and the U.S., debuts with a slender yet mighty short story collection that delivers one head-snapping smack after another. Arimah's potently concentrated portrayals of young women who can't stop themselves from doing the wrong thing, especially by refusing to adhere to traditional Nigerian expectations for females to be obedient and self-sacrificing, possess tremendous psychological and social depth and resonance. Like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, she writes with subtlety and poignancy about the struggles of love and hope between daughters and mothers and fathers, including relationships complicated by the legacy of the Biafran War, class divides, and transatlantic separations, as in Wild, in which an in-trouble American teen is sent to live with her aunt in Lagos. Arimah's emotional and cultural precision and authenticity undergird her most imaginative leaps. She flirts with horror fiction, presents a ghost story, and creates an arresting form of magic realism in sync with that of Shirley Jackson, George Saunders, and Colson Whitehead. Babies are made of yarn, hair, and mud. In the title story, Mathematicians devote themselves to calculating and subtracting emotions, drawing them from living bodies like poison from a wound. Arimah's stories of loss, grief, shame, fury, and love are stingingly fresh and complexly affecting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2016

Arimah won the 2015 African Commonwealth Prize for the Granta-published "Light," was a finalist for the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing for the title story, and was a National Magazine Award finalist for a New Yorker story that sent the publisher scurrying after her. All of which recommends this debut collection, which deals with relationships complicated by cultural conflict--something the Nigerian-born Arimah, who came to America at age 13, can talk about acutely.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2017

DEBUT Arimah has lived in Nigeria and the United States, and her stories reflect international breadth but also capture an expat's sense of alienation. In "Light," a Nigerian father tries to raise his daughter while her mother is away studying in the United States. The mother and daughter in "Windfalls" are a pair of grifters, traveling through America and living off staged accidents and liability suits. Some stories reach for different genres and often come with a surprising twist or ending. "Who Will Greet You at Home," a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, is a surreal tale about a young woman who crafts a baby out of hair that's also an extended metaphor on a woman's ultimately life-draining desire to have a child. "What Is a Volcano?" is a mythic folktale, while the title story is a remarkable piece of Afrocentric sf: mathematicians discover a formula that can allow some people to extract grief from others, which enables some people to fly--if not reliably. VERDICT Several pieces in this powerful debut collection already have garnered awards, and each story, tightly crafted and unique, will etch into your memory. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 10/31/16.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2017

DEBUT Arimah has lived in Nigeria and the United States, and her stories reflect international breadth but also capture an expat's sense of alienation. In "Light," a Nigerian father tries to raise his daughter while her mother is away studying in the United States. The mother and daughter in "Windfalls" are a pair of grifters, traveling through America and living off staged accidents and liability suits. Some stories reach for different genres and often come with a surprising twist or ending. "Who Will Greet You at Home," a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, is a surreal tale about a young woman who crafts a baby out of hair that's also an extended metaphor on a woman's ultimately life-draining desire to have a child. "What Is a Volcano?" is a mythic folktale, while the title story is a remarkable piece of Afrocentric sf: mathematicians discover a formula that can allow some people to extract grief from others, which enables some people to fly--if not reliably. VERDICT Several pieces in this powerful debut collection already have garnered awards, and each story, tightly crafted and unique, will etch into your memory. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 10/31/16.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.