GOD OF MERCY
by hard-line Christian pastor Innocent, who sees her as one of a handful of blasphemers in need of imprisonment and correction. In terms of theme and conflict, as well as references to Nigerian folklore, the novel owes a debt to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, revising that novel’s message for the recent past. (Interstitial diary entries by Ijeoma are written circa 2000.) And though the novel feels overlong considering its narrow scope, it has a pair of distinctive qualities that makes Nwoka worth continued attention. First is their command of different rhetorical modes. Within Ijeoma’s family and community, the prose is rhythmic and stylish; within Innocent’s world, it’s stentorian and shaped by cold logic. Second is an earned note of optimism that highlights Ijeoma’s indomitability in the face of tragedy. Oppression and fear are constants both within Ijeoma’s family and outside her enclave, but Nwoka also suggests the possibility of escape. A well-turned dramatization of spiritual and social culture clashes.
Nwoka, Okezie Astra House (304 pp.) $27.00 | Nov. 2, 2021 978-1-662-60083-8 A girl with the ability to fly disrupts the pieties of those around her. When we first meet Ijeoma, the mute hero of Nwoka’s fablelike first novel, she’s an adventurous 9-year-old in a tight-knit rural community. When she demonstrates an ability to levitate, everybody is awestruck, and, in short order, terrified. Her father, Ofodile, worries that she’s possessed and has upset the order among rival gods. That concern intensifies when Ijeoma conducts other heterodox acts: surreptitiously feeding an infant that’s been left alone in a forest, thus intervening in a ritual attempt to cleanse it of evil spirits; or consorting with an “osu,” or spiritual outcast. Soon the crisis expands beyond the community, as Ijeoma is claimed
COUNT TO THREE
Ragan, T.R. Thomas & Mercer (281 pp.) $15.95 paper | Dec. 14, 2021 978-1-5420-9394-1 A Sacramento shamus and her ambitious assistant search for a teenager whose abduction was witnessed by their preteen client. Most private eyes wouldn’t touch a case at the behest of Ethan Grant. The kid smokes in front of them, has limited financial resources, and is only 12 years old. But both members of the Callahan Agency have their reasons for agreeing to look for Ali Cross, a high school–age painter whom Ethan saw knocked out and bundled into a van as he watched from a distance, paralyzed by fear. Quinn Sullivan hopes to make a case for her full partnership in the agency. And Dani Callahan still can’t forget the day five years ago when her daughter, Tinsley, left her first day of kindergarten with a woman dressed exactly like Dani and vanished. The trauma drove Dani and her husband, Matthew, apart, and now that he’s married Carole, a woman who won’t need the expensive fertility treatments that produced Tinsley, he just wants Dani to get over her loss. But Dani can’t get over it, and her inability to do so urges her to look for Ali, identify the mysterious figure who keeps breaking into attorney Cameron Bennington’s house, figure out why Quinn’s mother never came home from grocery shopping years ago, and identify the woman who kidnapped Tinsley. Readers hooked by Ragan’s earlier suspensers, such as No Going Back (2021), will wait with bated breath to watch all these threads come together— unless perhaps they don’t and have to be laboriously untangled one strand at a time. By-the-book thrills lead to a cascade of anticlimaxes.
18
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1 october 2021
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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