JULY 2013 - AudioFile
Darling grows up in the inappropriately named town of Paradise, in Zimbabwe, during the Mugabe regime. It’s a town of shacks built after the residents watched their homes being bulldozed. With her rich, beautiful voice, Robin Miles adopts an authentic accent and a childish tone to recount the exploits of Darling and her oddly named friends. Events range from the tragicomic stealing of guavas from the rich houses, which they eat until they’re constipated, to the downright tragic game of reenacting the beating death of an antigovernment activist. When Darling moves to “Destroyedmichygen,” Miles subtly changes the accent to reflect Darling’s new way of speaking as she becomes an American teenager. Darling is an illegal immigrant who cannot visit home, and her growing feeling that she doesn’t really belong anywhere is tangible. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Uzodinma Iweala
Bulawayo describes all this in brilliant language, alive and confident, often funny, strong in its ability to make Darling's African life immediate without resorting to the kind of preaching meant to remind Western readers that African stories are universal, our local characters globalized, our literature moving beyond the postcolonial into what the novelist Taiye Selasie has best characterized as Afropolitan…Bulawayo is clearly a gifted writer. She demonstrates a striking ability to capture the uneasiness that accompanies a newcomer's arrival in America, to illuminate how the reinvention of the self in a new place confronts the protective memory of the way things were back home.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
…deeply felt and fiercely written…the voice Ms. Bulawayo has fashioned for her [narrator, Darling] is utterly distinctive—by turns unsparing and lyrical, unsentimental and poetic, spiky and meditative…Using her gift for pictorial language, Ms. Bulawayo gives us snapshots of Zimbabwe that have the indelible color and intensity of a folk art painting…Ms. Bulawayo gives us a sense of Darling's new life [in the United States] in staccato takes that show us both her immersion in and her alienation from American culture. We come to understand how stranded she often feels, uprooted from all the traditions and beliefs she grew up with, and at the same time detached from the hectic life of easy gratification in America.
Publishers Weekly
The short story that was adapted to become the first chapter of this debut novel by current Stegner fellow Bulawayo won the Caine Prize in 2011, known as the African Booker. Indeed the first half of the book, which follows a group of destitute but fearless children in a ravaged, never-named African country, is a remarkable piece of literature. Ten-year-old Darling is Virgil, leading us through Paradise, the shantytown where she and her friends Bastard, Godknows, Sbho, and Stina live and play. “Before,” they lived in real houses and went to school—that is, before the paramilitary policemen came and destroyed it all, before AIDS, before Darling’s friend Chipo was impregnated by her own grandfather. Now they roam rich neighborhoods, stealing bull guavas and hiding in trees while gangs raid white homes. Darling and her friends invent new names for themselves from American TV and spent their time trying to get “rid of Chipo’s stomach.” Abruptly, Darling lands with her aunt in America, seen as an ugly place, and absorbs the worst of its culture—Internet porn, obscene consumerism, the depreciation of education. Darling may not be worse off, but her life has not improved in any meaningful way. When Bulawayo won the Caine Prize, she said, “I want to go and write from home. It’s a place which inspires me. I don’t feel inspired by America at all,” and the chapters set outside of Africa make this abundantly clear. In this promising novel’s early chapters, Bulawayo’s use of English is disarmingly fresh, her arrangement of words startling. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency. (June)
JULY 2013 - AudioFile
Darling grows up in the inappropriately named town of Paradise, in Zimbabwe, during the Mugabe regime. It’s a town of shacks built after the residents watched their homes being bulldozed. With her rich, beautiful voice, Robin Miles adopts an authentic accent and a childish tone to recount the exploits of Darling and her oddly named friends. Events range from the tragicomic stealing of guavas from the rich houses, which they eat until they’re constipated, to the downright tragic game of reenacting the beating death of an antigovernment activist. When Darling moves to “Destroyedmichygen,” Miles subtly changes the accent to reflect Darling’s new way of speaking as she becomes an American teenager. Darling is an illegal immigrant who cannot visit home, and her growing feeling that she doesn’t really belong anywhere is tangible. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
A loosely concatenated novel in which Darling, the main character and narrator of the story, moves from her traditional life in Zimbabwe to a much less traditional one in the States. For Darling, life in Zimbabwe is both difficult and distressing. Her wonderfully named friends include Chipo, Bastard, Godknows and Sbho, and she also has a maternal figured called Mother of Bones. The most pathetic of Darling's friends is Chipo, who's been impregnated by her own grandfather and who undergoes a brutal abortion. The friends have little to do but go on adventures that involve stealing guavas in more affluent neighborhoods than the one they come from (disjunctively named "Paradise"), an act that carries its own punishment since the constipation they experience afterward is almost unbearable. Violence and tragedy become a casual and expected part of their lives. In one harrowing scene, their "gang" attacks a white-owned farm and both humiliates and brutalizes the owners. Also, after a long period of absence and neglect, Darling's father returns, suffering from AIDS. Spiritual sustenance is rare and comes in the form of an evangelist with the unlikely but ripe name of Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro. Eventually, and rather abruptly, Darling moves from the heat and dirt of Zimbabwe to live with her Aunt Fostalina and Uncle Kojo in the American Midwest, a place that seems so unlike her vision of America that it feels unreal. In America, Darling must put up with teasing that verges on abuse and is eager to return to Zimbabwe, for her aunt is working two jobs to pay for a house in one of the very suburbs that Darling and her friends used to invade. Bulawayo crafts a moving and open-eyed coming-of-age story.
