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By Buki Papillon. 2020
An Ordinary Wonder is a story of the courage needed to be yourself.Oto leaves for boarding school with one plan:…
excel and escape his cruel home. Falling in love with his roommate was certainly not on the agenda, but fear and shame force him to hide his love and true self.Back home, weighed down by the expectations of their wealthy and powerful family, the love of Oto's twin sister wavers and, as their world begins to crumble around them, Oto must make drastic choices that will alter the family's lives for ever.Richly imagined with art, proverbs and folk tales, this moving and modern novel follows Oto through life at home and at boarding school in Nigeria, through the heartbreak of living as a boy despite their profound belief they are a girl, and through a hunger for freedom that only a new life in the United States can offer. An Ordinary Wonder is a powerful coming-of-age story that explores complex desires as well as challenges of family, identity, gender and culture, and what it means to feel whole.An Ordinary Wonder is a story of the courage needed to be yourself.Oto leaves for boarding school with one plan:…
excel and escape his cruel home. Falling in love with his roommate was certainly not on the agenda, but fear and shame force him to hide his love and true self.Back home, weighed down by the expectations of their wealthy and powerful family, the love of Oto's twin sister wavers and, as their world begins to crumble around them, Oto must make drastic choices that will alter the family's lives for ever.Richly imagined with art, proverbs and folk tales, this moving and modern novel follows Oto through life at home and at boarding school in Nigeria, through the heartbreak of living as a boy despite their profound belief they are a girl, and through a hunger for freedom that only a new life in the United States can offer. An Ordinary Wonder is a powerful coming-of-age story that explores complex desires as well as challenges of family, identity, gender and culture, and what it means to feel whole.The first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller's stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990…
book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller's first calling was to the written word: "I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely," she once confessed. Muellerís 1990 Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the first volume of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, was the largest collection of stories she compiled during her life. But it presented only a slice of Mueller's prolific work as a writer. This new, landmark volume collects all of Mueller's stories: from the original contents of Clear Water, to additional stories discovered by Amy Scholder for the posthumous anthology Ask Dr. Mueller, to selections from Mueller's art and advice columns for Details and the East Village Eye, to still "new" stories collected and published here for the first time. Olivia Laing's new introduction situates Mueller's writing within the context of her life—and our times. Thanks to recent documentaries like Mallory Curley's A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia and Chloé Griffin's oral biography Edgewise, Mueller's life and work have been discovered by a new generation of readers. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories returns essential source material to these readers, the archive of Mueller's writing itself. Mueller's many mise en scènes—the Baltimore of John Waters, post-Stonewall Provincetown, avant-garde Italy, 1980s New York, an America enduring Reagan and AIDS—patches together a singular personal history and a primer for others. As Laing writes in her introduction, Collected Stories amounts to "a how-to manual for a life ricocheting joyously off the rails . . . a live corrective to conformity, conservatism, and cruelty."⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'OMG!!! This has to be my best book of the year!... Made me laugh and it made me cry!...…
So heartbreaking but inspiring at the same time. Loved it!' Goodreads ReviewerA powerful novel about an intersex Nigerian teenager and the courage to be yourself.Narrated by Adjoa Andoh whose many film and TV roles include Doctor Who, Adulthood and most recently Lady Danbury in the Netflix drama Bridgerton. Adjoa directed and starred in Richard II, the first ever company of women of colour in a Shakespeare play on a major UK stage.Raised as a boy in a grand but unhappy family in Nigeria, Otolorin Akinro escapes to boarding school knowing two things: she is truly a girl, and to stay safe, she must hide that truth.Away from the cruelty of her childhood home, Oto blooms even as she strives to be the best boy she can, finding true friendship and working hard to earn a scholarship to an American university, hoping someone out there might help her understand the secrets her body holds.But she cannot stay away forever. Back home for the holidays, though Oto and her beloved twin sister are overjoyed to see each other, their mother's violence erupts once more and when a terrible incident rips their lives apart, Oto is left alone.As her world goes up in flames, can Otolorin rebuild a life from the ashes of her true self?You won't be able to stop listening to this heartbreaking and uplifting coming-of-age story about family, identity, gender and culture and discovering your whole, true self. If you loved The Vanishing Half, The Girl with the Louding Voice or The Death of Vivek Oji, you'll adore this moving book.What listeners are saying about An Ordinary Wonder:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'WOW!!!! I absolutely LOVED this book... A powerful, engrossing, sad, but also joyous book. I could not stop listening and reading once I started it.' Goodreads Reviewer⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'This story was so sad!!!... Just broke my heart.' Goodreads Reviewer⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'One of the best, most beautiful and most incredible books I've ever read in my entire life.' Goodreads Reviewer⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'I thought I was going to make it all the way through to end of this book without crying. Turns out, I was very wrong... After the tears, you're cheering with the characters all the way to the end.' Goodreads Reviewer⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Wow! This book is so totally awesome!... An amazing story.' Goodreads Reviewer⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Moved me to tears but also filled me with hope. An emotional, heartbreaking read, with a plot that kept me gripped and stunning writing. I'm still thinking about this book months after reading it.' Goodreads Reviewer⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Brilliant... The tension builds up and honestly the author squeezed every emotion out of me!' Reader review