I'm happy to see a novel from a big press and lots of attention in the book world that has literary themes which for years--despite high reader interest--have been ignored (censored?):
Ecological and cultural destruction, a young woman's coming-of-age, social justice and family/community courage and resilience, revolution: a fictional Indigenous village takes on Big Oil!
Flight of the Goose is set in Arctic Alaska of 1971, while How Beautiful We Were is set in West Africa in a more contemporary time-- but there are many parallels. In my wildest dreams they could become companion books.
The publisher writes: "Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom."
Let's have many more such novels get published and read. I'd like to think it will help all of us on Earth to survive.
