This Is How We Come Back Stronger, Edited by Feminist Book Society
This Is How We Come Back Stronger is a collection of essays published in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing crisis, and each essay deals with some aspect of how to turn crisis into change and come out on the other side. The prompt given to the contributors seems like it was wide open because the range of essays is wonderfully far-reaching and expansive, talking about everything from sexism, racism, and injustice to trans rights and disability rights, all in the repercussions of COVID and encompassing the genres of essay, short story, poetry, and interview. While I wish I would have read this collection closer to when COVID started, it is unfortunate to see how much these issues are at a standstill and how little progress has been made; reading the authors’ manifest hope and optimism for the future, from the future has the opposite effect, at least for me. That’s not to say I am not hopeful for, or optimistic about, the future, but to observe that the adage about one step forward and two steps back seems only too true in the midst of 2025.
Dust, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Set in Kenya in the early 2000s, with flashbacks to the 1960s, Dust starts with the death of Odidi Oganda, and follows each family member’s struggle to overcome their grief and deal with the ever-encroaching events of the present, which force them to both come to terms with the past and to accept how the present day came to be. Entwining colonialism and revolution with the daily choices everyone has to make, Adhiambo Owuor portrays not only how the ugliest parts of humanity have the power to strip us of our own, but also the magnitude of our strength and the will to survive. Adhiambo Owuor’s prose, while overly flowery and poetic (so much so that I often had to read her words more than once to fully understand them), powerfully depicts both the ugly underbelly of a country fighting to be itself and the beauty of said effort.