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Title	:	Say You're One of Them
Author	:	Uwem Akpan
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 358 pages
Published	:	September 18th 2009 by Little, Brown and Company (first published June 5th 2008)
Categories	:	Fiction. Cultural. Africa. Short Stories

Say You're One of Them

Uwem Akpan

Hardcover | Pages: 358 pages

Rating: 3.52 | 14134 Users | 2339 Reviews

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Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few readers will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord. In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa. Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent.

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Original Title:	Say You're One of Them
ISBN:	0316113786 (ISBN13: 9780316113786)
Edition Language:	English
Setting:	Benin Kenya Ethiopia …more Rwanda Nigeria Africa …less
Literary Awards:	Guardian First Book Award Nominee for Longlist (2008), Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee for Fiction (2009), PEN Open Book Award (2009), Paris Book Festival for Compilation/Anthology (2010), Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction (2009) Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in Africa (2009)

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Ratings: 3.52 From 14134 Users | 2339 Reviews

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I think the point of the book was to leave you unsettled, to make you feel and empathize with characters in which our western culture individuals will probably never meet. I absolutely love books that dive into other cultures, religions and social systems. I love Africa and used to believe my calling in life was to minister to HIV/AIDS orphans, so I greatly educated myself and began writing every paper and project I could on the injustices engulfing Africa. But this book to me, was a major

Confession (i don't mean to use that term ironically at all--this book was written by a Jesuit priest!): i did not read the final story because i had read it when it was published in a literary magazine some years ago. And honestly i've had it with this book...his writing is almost too powerful and the stories were almost too stressful for me. I can't believe this is a debut collection. I fear his next book but will likely be one of the first to snatch it up.

There are touching moments and very realistic moments in these stories. However, even though the subject of the horrors in the lives of children in Africa is good and topical, I found the stories hard to follow sometimes with broken English and actions that don't necessarily follow the dialogue. I also don't like tales without any kind of positives or potential redemption or solutions to problems. Please leave us with a tiny bit of hope.

It's difficult to justify giving this book five stars as there are so many problems with it. But to give it less would not acknowledge that its flaws and difficulties are outweighed by how it opens your eyes, gives you clear vision into things you didn't even know you'd been shortsighted about before.Firstly, two of the stories are novellas of considerable length and extremely difficult to read. This is because, in an effort to give local flavour to the dialogue, letters are transposed, French

just picked up from the library.Read the three short-ish ones and they, particularly 'My Parent's Bedroom' have knocked me down with their power...later: still reeling from this one. He's not the greatest writer in the world - the three short pieces are superbly done, but the longer pieces - novellas really - are too long, repetitive, relying on exposition too much. But that doesn't seem to matter, you forget the difficulties of dealing with the odd dialects, French and 'African' English because

5 short stories of children caught in horrific battles for their life and liberty in Africa, Say You're One of Them is so heart-breaking, although it is wonderfully written and engaging, I would never want to read it again.

Uwem Akpan is a man acquainted with grief. He is a Jesuit priest from Nigeria, and these stories, all beautifully written from the point of view of children, are intended to help people see that "the situation of Africa is very urgent."That is putting it mildly. It took me months to finish this book; for long stretches of time I became reluctant to pick it up again. The violence in the stories is as or more brutal than any I've read. But it is very far from the gratuitous pap that is fed to us