How Beautiful We Were is more acutely felt than most of the real-life environmental tragedies that populate today’s headlines. A fictional eco-disaster set in the also fictional African village of Kosawa, Mbue’s second novel eviscerates the hypocrisies and externalized hungers of the fossil fuel industry and its natural resource extraction, which have become all too like the weather: always there and nothing to be done about it. But Thula, a young girl at the book’s outset, does indeed take action, leading a revolution against an oil company and its corporate lackeys. Beautiful spans generations, time blurs, and no one is rendered in simple black and white—neither capitalist colonizers nor the villagers who fight for their traditional lands. From start to finish, it’s powerful and empathetic, important, and devastating: “When we began to wobble and stagger, tumbling and snapping like feeble little branches, they told us it would soon be over, that we would all be well in no time…They told us we had to trust them.”