2024 Honors College Summer One Read featured How Beautiful We Were, one of The New York Times 10 best books of the year, by Imbolo Mbue (a Rutgers graduate from Cameroon). Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were is the story of a decades-long fight for environmental justice. The novel centers around the Nangi family, telling their story of challenging the destruction of their ancestral land by an American oil company from multiple different perspectives over the course of the book.
This book was chosen by a committee of two Honors College faculty members and nine dedicated students from across various majors and years. The committee chose two books to read and evaluate, meeting multiple times over the Spring 2024 semester to discuss which book would benefit our incoming first-year students the most.
How Beautiful We Were is a compelling narrative that offers multiple complex perspectives on creating social change and pushing back against colonialism and other oppressive systems that threaten many local communities.
The book was discussed during the Honors College Welcome Week, as well as in both required first-year courses, Honors College Forum and Cross-Cultural Competency.