How She Left
‘Happiness, Like Water,’ by Chinelo Okparanta

By LIGAYA MISHAN
Published: September 13, 2013

The stories in Chinelo Okparanta’s first collection are quiet, often unnervingly so, in the manner of a stifled shriek. Hints of menace — a reference to a robbery, an illness, a drop of blood on peeling linoleum — are delivered blandly, matter-of-factly, as if resisting the urge to dramatize were a kind of survival mechanism.

This is deceptive, for the plots in “Happiness, Like Water” are heated where the prose is not. A woman waits with a gun pointed at her head as a thief commands her husband to hand over his beloved Peugeot, suddenly aware that the car is worth more to her husband than her life; a spinster plans to murder a pregnant friend and steal her unborn child; a virginal college student, desperate to send her ailing mother to a private hospital, agrees to go out with a rich “patron,” deluding herself that all he wants is a pretty date who can “discuss budget and political issues. . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/books/review/happiness-like-water-by-chinelo-okparanta.html?_r=0