3.5 stars. There was some really beautiful prose in this book. The storyline focuses on a fractured family in the wake of the death of the father (not a spoiler, as this happens in the first 2 words of the book!). There is some intense and very disturbing violence. ( )

Very very good: portraits of believable, flawed characters and their interactions with each other. Beautiful, descriptive writing. Everything perhaps wrapped up too neatly at the end, but at the same time, this is the sort of book where everything gets to wrap up neatly, with enough open-endedness to not make the ending feel cheap. Looking forward to reading more books by this author! ( )

Don't read anything about this book. Just read it. ( )

This book had a lyrical beauty. And also too much of it. ( )

This book has had so much hype that it's hard for it to live up to it, but it largely delivers. The main flaw is that Selasi can't resist the first-novelist tendency to overwrite and embellish her prose. I kept comparing it to The God of Small Things, both in a few plot points and the general style of the novel. Overall, I think I would have enjoyed it more with a better set of expectations--the media has set it up as The Next Great Novel, and it's not there yet. Selasi needs to appreciate the value of simplicity and clarity--at times, her desire for poetry and subtlety takes over and I had to go back a few pages to make sure the timeline was clear in my mind. (I do not object to novels that jump within the timeline; I just want to be able to follow where I am from paragraph to paragraph.) ( )