Say You're One of Them

I picked up Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them for the silly reason of liking the cover. I tried reading it a while ago before I abandoned it. The spine once again caught my eye and I tried again, immediately drawn in by Akpan's prose. It's a tough book to get through though, so I had to continue to put it down, to take a break from the extreme heaviness of it. The book is a collection of short stories (two of which are extremely long) about the desolate living conditions of children in Africa. I read a review that called it "poverty porn," stating that a person can't really like this book as there is nothing remotely enjoyable about it, which is a fair argument. The stories are beyond heartbreaking; they are brutal. I wasn't entirely prepared for that with the praise on the back of the book that included the word "jubilant" and said it showed the resilience of children. But when things are so agonizing, why should a child be expected to be resilient, to bounce back from that?

Say You're One of Them is a difficult book to recommend since it's the kind of book you want to set aside and forget about, to pretend life is not so harsh for so many. But of course that's what I love about fiction: that it opens the reader up to other worlds, shows life from another's perspective, and leaves the reader with a heart full of empathy... and this book did just that. It pulled me from my comfortable life and introduced me to the horror of life for some children in Africa.