She is rough, tough and at times even cruel, shaped by circumstances that are unfathomable to most Americans: an absent father who returns home only to die, a mother who is often missing as well, no school to attend because the public schools have been closed, precarious and unhealthy living conditions, a failed system of government that subjugates and disenfranchises the adults in her community, and the constant presence of hunger and death. This character, rather than a plot, keeps the reader turning the pages.ĭespite her name, Darling is neither a sweet nor an endearing child.

We watch her grow over the remainder of the book as she hangs out with her pack of friends in the ironically named Zimbabwean neighborhood of Paradise, and later after she moves to Michigan to live with her aunt.

In the opening story, she is 11 years old. We Need New Names is for readers who fall under the latter of these two categories, because all but two of the stories feature the same protagonist, Darling Nonkululeko Nkala. When I query my novel-reading friends why they don’t read short stories, they offer up two reasons: first, they want a plot that pulls them in quickly and strings them along through the entire book second, they become emotionally attached to the characters and don’t want to have a new protagonist appear and disappear every 10 or 20 pages. As in other novels in stories, such as Olive Kittredge and A Visit from the Goon Squad, each chapter has its own title and can stand alone read together, however, Bulawayo’s collection successfully weaves together a more intricate story of powerlessness, displacement and the devastation wrought by the failed state of Bulawayo’s home country of Zimbabwe.Īs the author of a novel in stories and an avid reader of the short form, I am puzzled by the apparent preference for novels over story collections that compels publishers to market books such as Bulawayo’s as a novel. Despite the claim on the cover of NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut, We Need New Names, that the book is a novel, it would have been more accurate to label it as another example of that wonderfully complex hybrid, a novel in stories.

We need new names review