"Lagos thrums with the menace of a sharp-toothed grin, gaping as wide as the city's appalling income gap. Newly arrived is wide-eyed Yosoye, eager to molt her provincial youth and embrace her plum assignment helping plan a luxe development on dredged land just off shore. But beneath this dream gig lurks a nightmare: Pregnant women are drowning themselves in epidemic numbers, and Yosoye sways uneasily on the cusp of understanding why. Slosh."
"Even if you don't recognize her name, it's likely you've already encountered Crenshaw's ideas. The law professor and public intellectual coined the concepts of intersectionality and critical race theory, both of which lately have become outsize bywords on classroom syllabi, newspaper opinion pages and statehouses across the country. In this memoir, though, Crenshaw eschews the scholarly register for a more intimate approach, viewing the country and the convoluted discourse that defines it through the arc of her own personal story."
"Sharp's premise could really go any number of ways: A young woman, life is in disarray, takes a job at an all-girls school in an empty seasonal tourist town. That setup could start the logline to a horror-comedy, a mumblecore portrait of the Millennial in Winter, or a riff on the trope of the unlikely teacher doing anything it takes to get through to these kids, darn it! In truth, it's none of these things. Or all of them, actually, but only if you can picture it interpreted by a conscientious extraterrestrial - at once intensely observant and ineffably askew."
Lagos is portrayed as a city marked by extreme inequality, where a newly arrived young woman, Yosoye, takes a prestigious job helping plan a luxury development on dredged offshore land. Her optimism collides with a disturbing reality: pregnant women are drowning themselves in epidemic numbers, and she feels unsettled as she begins to understand why. The material also centers on intersectional ideas associated with Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, presented through an intimate personal memoir rather than a scholarly register. Other works include a story premise about a young woman taking a job at an all-girls school in an empty seasonal tourist town, rendered as funny, sad, discomfiting, and weird, with multiple possible genre interpretations.
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