Apartment Choice

At the heart of the novel is a less sensational yet still unconventional story: that of two girls learning to make their way in the world, told with all the complication and unruliness of life, and also with an unspoken argument about what it means to tell a story like this. As children we experience the raw brute force of our feelings, but in the formative adolescent years , Messud told me, we learn how to be a person — ‘‘what it is to be a daughter, what it is to be a friend, what home means, what love means.’’ We learn these things by observing other people, but also from the stories that we hear: the books we read, the films we watch, the myths our culture teaches us. Yet the narratives for girls tend to be ‘‘dire,’’ she said, with violence at the forefront. With ‘‘The Burning Girl,’’ she hoped to write what she calls ‘‘a children’s book for grown-ups,’’ a book that acknowledges the inarticulable, even irrational power of emotion — an ‘‘animal thing’’ beyond understanding. It trea...

Things Fall Apart It is hard to imagine being invaded and forced to change virtually all of our ways by a foreign nation. Unfortunately for the Ibo society, imperialism was forced upon them. All they could do was sit back and watch as the English changed all aspects of their life. Everything from religion to family life was changed by imperialism. The title, Things Fall Apart, suits the book very well because that is essentially what happened to the Umuofia village. The cultural traditions of Umuofia eventually fell apart. The main points of focus in Things Fall Apart are life inside the Ibo tribe, the struggle of one man’s desire to succeed, and imperialism. During part one of the story, Achebe takes the reader through the daily lives of the Ibo people. The reader is exposed to different aspects of Ibo culture like the role of women in society and the process of growing food. The role of women in the Ibo tribe was very specific and minimal. When a man wanted to marry a woman, he...