MARCH 2018 - AudioFile
Narrator Prentice Onayemi performs the bulk of this timely story of immigration, sexual identity, and black profiling. Despite early acceptance to Harvard, Niru carries the burden of knowing how impossible it will be for him to fulfill his religious, successful Nigerian-born parents’ idea of the American dream. Onayemi’s sympathetic delivery captures Niru’s double life using a light tone for the teen’s outer persona as a good son, friend, and student and becoming more somber when the boy broods about his suppressed homosexuality and his own vision of the future. Onayemi’s rendition of the Nigerian accents is believable and respectful. Julia Whelan’s performance of the sections told by Niru’s best friend, Meredith, emphasizes the girl’s youth and difficulty dealing with her role in Niru’s ultimate fate. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Dallas Morning News
The story unspools as quickly as running star Niru can clip around the track, building into a classical tragedy with modern flair.... The talented Iweala has fashioned a heart-rending story of teenage love that turns on the technological trappings and persistent prejudices of contemporary life.
Paste Magazine
A haunting story about identity and power.
Lambda Literary
Iweala stirringly brings to life a young man at war with himself in this moving new novel.... Speak No Evil isn’t an easy read. It is, however, compelling, sensitively told, and satisfying.
Washington Blade
Heart-wrenching .... A visceral but compassionate portrait of what it means to be different within a family, let alone society at large.
starred review Booklist
Delivers with immediate poignancy Niru’s struggles…. A later shift in narration allows a different and perhaps more complete picture of Niru, which Iweala also handles elegantly. Portraying cross-generational and -cultural misunderstandings with anything but simplicity, Iweala tells an essential American story.
Seattle Times
A searing take on the notion of home, and the struggle to be at home with oneself.... Speak No Evil deals with less epic subject matter [than Beasts of No Nation], but there’s subtle power in its intimacy and in its depictions of the violence we do to each other and to ourselves.
Larissa MacFarquhar
A wrenching, tightly woven story about many kinds of love and many kinds of violence. Speak No Evil probes deeply but also with compassion the cruelties of a loving home. Iweala’s characters confront you in close-up, as viscerally, bodily alive as any in contemporary fiction.”
Vogue
A timely story of friendship, secrets, and consequences.
AV Club
An evocative narrative and stark dialogue keeps Uzodinma Iweala’s Speak No Evil from a single dull moment.... His characters’ rawness and beauty overwhelm page by page, looping their two stories into one heartbreaking narrative, one that embodies and echoes the pains of current, broader inequalities.
Gary Shteyngart
A lovely slender volume that packs in entire worlds with complete mastery. Speak No Evil explains so much about our times and yet is never anything less than a scintillating, page-turning read.
The New Yorker
The classic coming-out narrative describes how the central character makes a leap from one identity to another, into a different, freer life, while the classic immigrant novel depicts what it’s like to straddle two worlds, old and new, with a foothold in each. Speak No Evil is both and neither.... The soul of Speak No Evil is the tortuous, exquisitely rendered relationship between Niru and his father.
Marlon James
Speak No Evil is the rarest of novels: the one you start out just to read, then end up sinking so deeply into it, seeing yourself so clearly in it, that the novel starts reading you.
The New Yorker on Beasts of No Nation
A startling debut.
Washington Post Book World on Beasts of No Nation
A tour de force.
New York Times on Beasts of No Nation
A lovely slender volume that packs in entire worlds with complete mastery. Speak No Evil explains so much about our times and yet is never anything less than a scintillating, page-turning read.
New Yorker on Beasts of No Nation
A startling debut.
MARCH 2018 - AudioFile
Narrator Prentice Onayemi performs the bulk of this timely story of immigration, sexual identity, and black profiling. Despite early acceptance to Harvard, Niru carries the burden of knowing how impossible it will be for him to fulfill his religious, successful Nigerian-born parents’ idea of the American dream. Onayemi’s sympathetic delivery captures Niru’s double life using a light tone for the teen’s outer persona as a good son, friend, and student and becoming more somber when the boy broods about his suppressed homosexuality and his own vision of the future. Onayemi’s rendition of the Nigerian accents is believable and respectful. Julia Whelan’s performance of the sections told by Niru’s best friend, Meredith, emphasizes the girl’s youth and difficulty dealing with her role in Niru’s ultimate fate. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
