Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It wasn't until I read the afterward that I noticed that all of the stories in this book where written from the perspective of children. I'm not really sure how I missed that. And in each story, the ending is hard to take. Incredibly hard.
The first two stories surprised me with a new way of looking at a topic: I hadn't really though about a child choosing a brothel because she thinks it would be better than streetwalking or that children sold into slavery would spend so long being prepped for the journey. The third story was very short but hit me the hardest - I'm not sure if it was just the extreme youth of the narrator or that it was on the surface the least horrifying of the tales, but the emotional impact was huge. The fourth story left me hoping that things might end well right up until the last page. And the last story drove the thread of despair home. It also confused me the most, as the interactions between the children and the parents really startled me - there seemed little care/attention shown to the children throughout large parts of the narrative.
I enjoyed the Luxurious Hearses story a great deal because the details of the different tribal groups and their religions ties in with the African history book I'm studying from.
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