A dictatorship in an unnamed African country reimagined with animals sounded intriguing but was repetitive and tedious.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a political book narrated by animals – think Redwall or Watership Down – but reading Glory took care of that lapse. Reading this novel made me feel I was sitting at the feet of a traditional master storyteller from Africa (at least how I imagine that would feel). Bulawayo’s characters relate the story of a fictional African country finally liberating themselves from the shackles of a dictatorship (think Robert Mugabwe in Zimbabwe) which in itself developed o...

Content Warning: death (including that of children), murder, violence, rape, racism, genocide, misogyny, homophobia, police brutality.In the fictional country of Jidada, where all the inhabitants are animals, Old Horse has ruled for decades. Following the deposition that topples him from his figurative (and perhaps literal) throne, and the animals living in Jidada who are fighting for their freedom, Glory is inspired by the real-life overthrow of Zimbabwe's tyrant Robert G. Mugabe in the 2017 co...

Glory is a satirical send-up of the fall and aftermath of the Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. The country, renamed Jidada for the story, is satirized as a janky outpost republic, caught in a post-colonial cycle of misrule. Each of the characters is portrayed as an animal - an old horse, donkey, pig, tweeting baboon (guess who) - which lends a layer of farce to the proceedings. Life in Jidada is brutal, although the brutality is somewhat minimized because the victims, like the perpetrators, are...

I've never been in this situation before - giving a rave review to a book I DNF'ed by page 50. The failure is all mine - I can only handle satire in small doses, no matter how delicious the dose. Instead of reading further, I dipped into many pages at random and found delights on every one. The language is wickedly exuberant, the characters/animals perfect pitch avatars for their real-life counterparts. Take for example "Dr. Sweet Mother", the younger donkey-wife of the aged horse Father of the

I can hardly believe that NoViolet Bulawayo accomplished what she did in novel Glory, a vivid satire about the unraveling of a dictatorship inspired by George Orwell's Animal Farm and by the oral traditions of Zimbabwe. At turns bitterly ironic, hilariously absurd, and painfully violent, this novel features Old Horse, the ruler of Jidada, and the story of the coup that tore him from his seat.It parodies the structures of fear, silence, toxic masculinity and patriarchy, hero worship, performative...

Strongly recommend audio for this. The reader, Chipo Chung, is extraordinary in assuming the many voices of the novel and getting their (very divergent) emotions and characters just right throughout. Because this is a novel of many voices in a cacophony of events, much like LINCOLN IN THE BARDO, this really matters and makes the entire wildly exuberant novel a theatrical event. As for the novel itself, I’m not a great fan of satire or of animals as stand-ins for people, but the writing is so fun...

A wondrous fable that recounts the fall of Robert Mugabe and eventually of the exploiters who succeeded him. Bulawayo uses the repetitive rhythms of oral recitations, and Chipo Chung’s narration of the audiobook beautifully matches Bulawayo’s intensity, whether in the initial scenes of crowd oratory or the quiet recounting of personal traumas suffered under Mugabe’s regime. It’s all presented as if the characters are animals, although the emotions and thoughts portrayed were so human that I had

In Jidada, the decades-long reign of the Old Horse is brought to an end. But will this be the beginning of the much needed change for a country which has lived through colonisation, liberation war, and then years of equally bloody "defending of the revolution"?In NoViolet Bulawayo triumphant sophomore novel "Glory" Animal Farm meets the recent and not so recent history of Zimbabwe: chimurenga, Nehanda, Robert Mugabe's reign, Gukurahundi, the coup-not-a-coup, Emmerson Mnangagwa's scarf to name ju...

A novel with best intentions, but ultimately an exhausting political metaphor that goes on and on and on, with names and places that defy pronunciation, a breast- beating polemic that is excruciatingly repetitive - with "Tholukuthi" and "Jidada with a - da and another - da" comprising about half the words in this 400 page slog. I know Bulawayo is trying to mirror the corruption, tyranny, terror and bloodshed of Zimbabwe's political and cultural history, with a cast of animals, and to an extent,

I'm doubtful anything is going to top this for me in 2022. It was an emotional rollercoaster though so ima need to go read a romance now.

This is an imaginative book completely spoiled for me by the writing, which is both pretentious and mechanically poor. Ordinarily I would not rate a book when I had only read the first chapter, but since the book is getting a lot of attention I wanted to warn people whose reaction might be like mine. These are the opening lines:When at last the Father of the Nation arrived for the Independence Day celebrations, no earlier than 3:28 in the afternoon, the citizens, congregated at the Jidada Square...

Wow, I couldn’t get into this book at all. After about twenty pages I couldn’t see any hope that I would settle in and appreciate it, so I’m giving up. Seems a little like an African version of Animal Farm, but all of society is animals and (in the beginning anyway) there are no people referred to at all. And the society sounds awful.I loved the author’s previous book, her first, “We Need New Names” so I’m very disappointed. Maybe if I had hung in more I would have liked it? Who knows. But I hav...

I strongly disliked this book. The writing style was so repetitive that it made me dizzy, and the hammering of repeated words and points was distracting. As a Christian, I was confused by the applied under-and overtones of religion. It was too long. It tried too hard to be clever. Animals as characters has been used before, but I much preferred Charlotte’s Web. In sum, reading this book consumed more than 15 hours of my life that I cannot regain.

You need to be in the right mood for this which unfortunately I was not. I wanted to be engrossed in a another world but by the very nature of this clever satire there’s a distance. I another mood I would have appreciated this far more.

This book walked the line between devastating and hilarious so skillfully. I don’t love satire, but this one propelled me through the story so smoothly- with repetition, varying story-telling methods, and a few very sympathetic central characters— that I couldn’t put it down. The sense of seething rage and deep mourning hiding beneath the witty allegory was truly masterful writing. At times you forget the characters are animals, which feels very intentional. Of course this is about the specific

Seemed slightly long to me, especially since Animal Farm is like 40 pages. But genuinely funny, at times brilliant, satire.

It's not even 2022 yet and I have only read three 2022 books but I am calling this: Glory is going to be one of my top ten 2022 books. A true storyteller. I have to read the sentences out loud because they are pure magic.

Review excerpt by Violet Kupersmith, NYT 3/6/22: This is not “Animal Farm.” Not its remix, nor its translation. “Glory” is its own vivid world, drawn from its own folklore…. [&] by aiming the long, piercing gaze of this metaphor at the aftereffects of European imperialism in Africa, Bulawayo is really out-Orwelling Orwell. This is a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny. Narrating from the perspective of a chorus of unseen Jidadans, Bulawayo displays a mordant wit with a

DNF. I felt bad putting it down so early, but there was simply no pleasure derived from reading it.I was hoping for more of an Animal Farm vibe, instead this is hyper focused on one specific country. I don't have any background knowledge of Zimbabwe's dictatorship, and this wasn't going to fill in any of those gaps. The characters were meaningless to me, therefore the people were lifeless, and ergo as much as I wanted to be invested in the story . . . I wasn't. What made the dictator bad? Why di...