No. 1 is always full of good ideas. He figures out what to do when a leopard is bothering the goats and when Mama Coca-Cola has problems with her house. But what will it take to make the fabulous Firebird stop in the village?

"'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to the...

Anna Hibiscus and her family are going to the village with Grandfather. They travel by bus through mangrove swamp and rainforest, through scrubland and rivers, over hills and mountains. When they arrive, everyone stays in Anna's family house, which first belonged to her great-grandmother and great-grandfather. Little has changed since then: there is no running water, no electricity, no road and no traffic signals. But Anna Hibiscus' life is about...

In 1967 Tanzania, when President Nyerere urges his people to work together as one extended family, the people of Litongo move to a new village which, to some, seems cursed, but where thirteen-year-old Shida, a healer, and her female cousins are allowed to attend school. Includes glossary and author's note.