Point of View

Each of the stories in "Say You're One of Them" is told from the perspective of a vulnerable child living in Africa. In the story "An Ex-Mas Feast," the narrator is an eight-year-old boy living in the slums of Nigeria with his poverty-stricken family. The boy is far too wise for his years, which only highlights the family's desperate situation for the reader. Much of the story is told through exposition, filtered through Jigana's thoughts, with bits of dialogue used almost solely to characterize the secondary characters and their family dynamics.

"Fattening for Gabon" is told through the first-person narration of Kotchikpa, a ten-year-old boy living in Benin with his sister and uncle. Kotchikpa's narration is particularly interesting because he is very naïve to the events unfolding around him. Without the opening line of the story, which reveals to the reader that Kotchikpa and his...