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PPCA Book Club

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PPCA’s Book Club gatherings are open to all who have read that month’s book. Typically we start out discussing the book, and inevitably someone relates a theme in the book to their own experiences or other readings, so the conversation takes an interesting turn. Our Book Club discusses books of broad interest set in parts of the world in which Peace Corps Volunteers have served, or books which were authored by Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs). We love author appearances! Since 2010, we have hosted over 40 different authors – in person, by phone, or via video.

Here are our next book discussions:

November 2026 Book Club Selection

Majumdar, Megha: A Guardian and a Thief (2025)

Discussion: Tuesday, November 10, 2026, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Paul and Susie Robillard, 5405 NW Deerfield Way in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89631948538?pwd=vqhgoFTqJVzsTyrwGkIxafHnZIs52n.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 896 3194 8538 and passcode 923357.

Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: In near-future Kolkata, the fates of two families become disastrously intertwined. With gorgeous writing and the pacing of a thriller, Majumdar’s second novel–after A Burning (2020)–transports the reader to a world ravaged by drought, burning heat, and severe food scarcity. As the story begins, it’s Day 1 of the week before Ma will take her 2-year-old daughter, Mishti, and her father, Dadu, to join her scientist husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on laboriously procured climate visas, which she regards as “treasure beyond her greatest hope.” Ma just left her job managing a shelter, an organization supported by the single remaining local billionaire, whose food donations she has been lightly skimming to keep her family fed. A teenage resident of the shelter, Boomba, devises a desperate plan to follow Ma home and recapture some of the booty for resale on the street, as he’s frantic to raise money to rescue his own parents and beloved younger sibling, languishing in dire straits outside the city. Among the items he grabs are Ma’s purse, containing the three passports, setting in motion a series of escalating catastrophes, crimes, and ironies, each darker than the last, all of it concealed by both Ma and Boomba in their hopeful phone conversations with husband and parents, respectively. Fully inhabiting both characters over the ensuing seven days, Majumdar reveals her unsettling message: A guardian and a thief lives in each of us. Her evocation of the lost world that lives in the characters’ memories makes the situation not just terrifying but almost criminally poignant, and the way she manages to connect all the storylines with a resolution that unfolds both globally and in one small living room is genius. This electrifying depiction of dignity and morality under siege reveals the horror hidden by the bland term “climate change.”

Where to find it:
Book Club Kit: Those who borrowed a loaned paperback copy of this book from the Book Club Kit are asked to return it on on discussion night November 10, 2026.
Libraries: Clackamas Co | Ft Vancouver | Multnomah Co | Washington Co
Vendors: Powell’s | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

December 2026 Book Club Selection

Garricks, Chimeka: A Broken People’s Playlist: Stories (from Songs) (2020/2023)

Discussion: Monday, December 7, 2026, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Rosemary Furfey, 7033 SW 33rd Ave in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89337792803?pwd=Ev9bups9IqO4nJMbygwaI7w4kg5Foy.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 893 3779 2803 and passcode 090323.

Review: ©Booklist: A dozen interlinked, music-oriented stories set in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where Garricks was raised, form an ode to feel-good moments (falling in love, finding second chances, reveling in gratitude) and grating dissonances (cheating spouses, living with regret, longing for forgiveness, grieving for a loved one). Readers will feel both bewildered by and invested in the interconnected and fractured lives of friends, lovers, and family members who long for peace and redemption. In Music, an aspiring DJ vows never to follow his womanizing father’s footsteps, but later in Desperado, heartbreaking details emerge as to why he was unable to keep his promise. In Hurt, a pampered son stages his own funeral as his older brother, also seen in Love’s Divine, tries to make up for his shortcomings. In the City presents a young man with a promising future caught in the crosshairs of police brutality. River highlights the violence in confraternities (secret student groups) in Nigerian universities. Friends ponder the meaning of true love, “when you’ve unloved the unlovely, the imperfect,” in Beautiful War. Each songlike story feels like a breakout hit encapsulating the brokenness and the beauty in life’s soundtrack.

Where to find it:
Libraries: Clackamas Co | Multnomah Co | Washington Co
Vendors: Powell’s | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

January 2027 Book Club Selection

Reva, Maria: Endling (2025)

Discussion: Wednesday, January 6, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Andrea Pepitone, 1509 SW Carson St in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88556124522?pwd=HB3pTIDWUyQSqaSBXI624waEYXUfqi.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 885 5612 4522 and passcode 703823.

Review: ©Publishers Weekly: In Reva’s astonishing metafictional tale (after Good Citizens Need Not Fear), a Ukrainian Canadian writer named Maria Reva attempts to write a novel about Ukraine’s mail-order bride industry on the eve of the Russian invasion. The novel’s first part consists of Reva’s novel in progress featuring Yeva, a snail conservationist working to save a species on the brink of extinction by traveling around the country in her RV turned lab to find specimens for breeding. To pay for her equipment, she joins guided romance tours and goes on dates with Western men looking for a pliable Ukrainian bride. Meanwhile, sisters Nastia and Sol strive to take the bridal industry down. After Nastia borrows Yeva’s RV with a plan to kidnap 12 of the bachelors, Russia invades and Reva’s manuscript grinds to a halt. Reva emerges as a character in the second part, reeling from the bombings and worrying about her grandfather, who still resides in occupied Kherson, as she watches the news from Vancouver. She disappoints her agent with the news that she’s quit the novel (“I was writing about a so-called invasion of Western bachelors to Ukraine, and then an actual invasion happened…. To continue now seems unforgivable”). Reva then writes a grant proposal to travel in Ukraine for research on a “postnovel” about her birth country in flux. When she returns in the final section to her three revolutionary anti-brides, their adventure brilliantly dovetails with Reva’s literary experiment and wartime reckoning. This inspired and urgent novel is bound to make a major splash.

February 2027 Book Club Selection

Shank, Naomi*: When the Universe Pivots (2026)

* RPCV Senegal 1989-1991

Discussion: Wednesday, February 17, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Lesly Sanocki, 2090 NW Overton Ct in Beaverton. Participating in our discussion, via Zoom, will be the book’s author, Naomi Shank. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84090044201?pwd=xIHZBK76IHrk5gQ4QV166ctwKSIkte.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 840 9004 4201 and passcode 634298.

Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: Shank offers a novel about an American scholar in Senegal who’s determined to find connections that unite disparate cultures. It’s 2008, and as the story opens, Alice Fontaine is on a flight from the United States to Senegal on the western coast of Africa. She knows the country well, having served there as a Peace Corps volunteer until 1992. On this visit, she hopes to work on her doctoral dissertation, in which Alice has been trying to “square together the puzzle pieces of American and Senegalese history”; she feels, for instance, that New Orleans has “a definite West African vibe,” due to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Alice is accompanied by her niece, Sylvie LaBrite, who’s come along as a professional photographer; Sylvie’s father and another aunt would rather that she take a position at the family company, LaBrite Diamonds, instead of adventuring in Africa. The pair’s arrival into Senegal’s “Sub-Saharan elixir of heat and dryness” is merely the beginning of the tale; the narrative journeys to various time periods, from the German Coast of Louisiana in the 1800s to the 21st century, when new ways of remembering enslaved people emerged. Shank incorporates striking details along the way as Alice pursues her research; for example, readers learn how the Seereer people of Senegal create poydomes for gravesites—structures that contain the deceased’s bed, as well as “their possessions, such as the clothing and tools they will need on the other side”; the tradition is strikingly similar to some ancient Egyptian burial practices. Such content has much to offer readers, and the work provides several surprises as the main characters uncover unexpected knowledge. An inviting and studied take on the many links between the past and the present.

Where to find it:
Vendors: Powell’s | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

March 2027 Book Club Selection

Lowstuter, Derek*: Fiddler on the Roof of Africa: How to Fail Successfully as a Peace Corps Volunteer (2024)

* RPCV Ethiopia 2010-2012

Discussion: Monday, March 15, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Betsy Samuels, 3737 NE Marine Dr (Rose City Yacht Club) in Portland. Anytime on or after March 8, please call or text Betsy at 503-701-6218 for the gate code. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Participating in our discussion, via Zoom, will be the book’s author, Derek Lowstuter. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82639235307?pwd=c0SPaHqnrUubJqbAWcaKfiuB4YWV3L.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 826 3923 5307 and passcode 100471.

Synopsis: The award-winning Fiddler on the Roof of Africa: How to Fail Successfully as a Peace Corps Volunteer is an engaging, candid, and unusually self-critical account of Peace Corps service in Ethiopia. Blending memoir, cultural observation, humor, and analysis of international development, Derek Lowstuter avoids both romanticizing his experience and dismissing it as a failure. Instead, he explores the uncertainty, cultural misunderstandings, frustrations, relationships, and small successes that complicate efforts to “help” communities across cultural boundaries. The book is at its strongest when personal stories become opportunities to question assumptions about development, service, and what success actually means. At once funny, uncomfortable, thoughtful, and affectionate toward Ethiopia and its people, Fiddler on the Roof of Africa offers a nuanced portrait of how living and working abroad can challenge a person’s worldview while revealing how much people from seemingly different cultures share in common.

Where to find it:
Libraries: Multnomah Co
Vendors: Powell’s | Amazon | Spring Cedars

April 2027 Book Club Selection

Thakali, Renée* and Pratiskshya Thakali: The Joyous Fort, Our Homeland in Thini: Origins and Traditions of a Thakali Family (2025)

* RPCV Nepal 1977-1979

Discussion: Tuesday, April 20, 2027, 7:00-8:30 pm. Hosted by Carole Beauclerk, 1500 SW Park Ave in Portland. On-street parking is free in downtown Portland after 7:00 pm. Use the scroll box and follow the prompts to contact Carole Beauclerk. The gate, which opens out to the street, will ring. Enter courtyard and enter through the immediate right door, then through the lobby and turn left to the meeting room. Participating in our discussion, via Zoom, will be the book’s author, Renée Thakali. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83510958050?pwd=xtbuaJCQVz6qCZRtWWAblDn2VbwJTh.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID
835 1095 8050 and passcode 138179.

Review: ©Peace Corps Connect: Renée, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal (1977–79), and Pratikshya, her relative by marriage, dive deep into the history, geography, traditions, kinship relationships, and religions of the Thakali people as experienced in Thini, an isolated Nepalese village in the Annapurna range halfway between India and Tibet. After Renée’s marriage to Aita, a local schoolteacher, she becomes part of his large extended family and adopts many of the community’s customs. Stories, music, food, and important rituals are explained in compelling detail, thanks to the contributions of her co-author, a local born and raised in Thini. The sociological underpinnings of this authentic Himalayan village will interest those curious about the past, present, and future of one of the world’s hidden places, not frequented by tourists.

Where to find it:
Vendors: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Baby

May 2027 Book Club Selection

Groff, David Huston*: A Disloyal White Man: Unlocking the Prison House of Race and Class (2026)

* RPCV Niger 1967-1970

Discussion: Wednesday, May 19, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Louise Shabazz, 195 N Broadway St in Estacada. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Participating in our discussion, in person, will be the book’s author, David Groff. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87979022810?pwd=TxNfh9QVbMGwyjZRlBDugy22l5yCiH.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 879 7902 2810 and passcode 736031.

Synopsis: A Disloyal White Man: Unlocking the Prison House of Race and Class is a collection of thirty-one essays that ask the question: Can a tall, pale-skinned, middle-class man of European descent move beyond the prejudices baked into him by American history and culture? The essays chronicle David Groff’s own sometimes painful journey away from unthinking whiteness toward a fuller understanding of and appreciation for the rich human tapestry in America and the wider world. This book will challenge readers to transcend their own racial and class identities and embrace a vision of America where the old prison house of race and class no longer constrains the emergence of what Martin Luther King Jr. called the beloved community.

Where to find it:
Vendors: Powell’s | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

June 2027 Book Club Selection

Albertus, Michael: Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (2025)

Discussion: Tuesday, June 15, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Paul and Susie Robillard, 5405 NW Deerfield Way in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87982076547?pwd=26FFBkFLMthExey5dNSehJo4Cxko5T.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 879 8207 6547 and passcode 791564.

Review: ©Library Journal: A prolific progressive social commentator and author, Albertus (political science, Univ. of Chicago; Property Without Rights) argues that land is the fundamental source of economic, social, and political power. Over the past two centuries, what Albertus describes as the Great Reshuffle has dramatically changed ownership patterns of land worldwide. His interest is how land reform can affect economic growth, racism, gender disparities, equity for Indigenous peoples, and the environment. His scholarly research and on-the-ground examination of land use and land reform over the past 15 years (mainly in non-industrialized countries) leads Albertus to argue that redistributing acreage to the tillers of land, with accompanying clear titles and generous government assistance, can combat racism, correct gender disparities, and stimulate economic growth in a bottom-up process. He also makes the case that top-down philanthropic and governmental efforts to conserve land can help heal the environment, as it has in Chile and Spain.

July 2027 Book Club Selection

Lemus, Jared: Guatemalan Rhapsody: Stories (2025)

Discussion: Thursday, July 8, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Tom Hilleary, 2827 NE Hamblet St in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88589997499?pwd=p1qkfTIFCEsuO26j4O1EVNXC8drhJq.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 885 8999 7499 and passcode 408278.

Review: ©Booklist: The men in Lemus’ debut mélange of short stories exist in desperate circumstances. Some are in rural Guatemala: a monkish member of a cultlike group and a niño have a mystical encounter in a remote jungle village; at a hotel in the jungle, the different management strategies of two brothers have dire consequences. Other characters are in American cities: a dishwasher who hopes to win a tattoo contest, a janitor at an elite college befriended by the new security guard whose hiring has put his job in jeopardy. Lemus’ characters have been negatively impacted by contact with the U.S. through immigration and deportation (themselves or family members) and even by entitled American tourists. The narrative voice dances between third and first person from story to story and pirouettes through the first-person plural in a tale about a soccer team of privileged youths being coached by a washed-up former star hired by their parents. Each story is beautifully bleak as it depicts unique situations; a few, like the inventive story in which the protagonist ponders two potential endings for himself—he takes the path of a sad-sack junkie or he cleans up and becomes a bus driver to help others like the bus driver who helped him—offer welcome glimmers of hope.

August 2027 Book Club Selection

Reid, Stuart A: The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (2023)

Discussion: Tuesday, August 3, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Peggy McClure, 5450 SW 18th Dr in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84297738744?pwd=020xHbT4z0Z23FWKbpGYtfRpuvqh9Z.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 842 9773 8744 and passcode 782873.

Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: A powerful account of “extensive U.S. meddling” in a foreign government, “a habit it perfected in the Congo.” The plot hatched by the CIA under the Eisenhower administration to rid the newly independent Congo of its elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was considered a “model” intervention at the time. As Reid, an executive editor at Foreign Affairs, shows, the Congo proved to be the first “theater” in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union transformed the Cold War “into a truly global struggle.” In this carefully nuanced study, the author underscores how ill-advised American officials were at the time about Lumumba and his supposed communist intentions. Fears of a communist takeover were perpetuated by the CIA’s station chief in the Congo at the time, Larry Devlin, and others who failed to fully grasp the significance of many African nations’ long struggles to decolonize. On June 30, 1960, the Congo tentatively declared itself free from Belgian rule, and UN peacekeeping forces were stationed there to aid the transition. However, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, wary of the newly elected Lumumba, who he thought “was being used by leftist Africans and the Soviet Union,” refused his plea for more aid to help quell a military mutiny and secessionist worries. When Lumumba turned to the Soviets for help (Nikita Khrushchev was largely noncommittal), the Americans sprang into action. Reid grippingly narrates the horrific tale of Lumumba’s imprisonment, torture, and execution by the henchmen of then-army chief Joseph Mobutu, a former Lumumba protégé and eager recipient of American cash. Sifting through significant new documentation, the author casts tremendous clarity on this important period and how essentially the world looked away. “The rest of the world seemed to decide [that] in the Congo, occasional barbarity was the price of stability.” An evenhanded work of deep scholarship that clearly elucidates a largely hidden piece of U.S. foreign policy.

September 2027 Book Club Selection

Tan, Twan Eng: The House of Doors (2023)

Discussion: Thursday, September 9, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Don & Kathy Evans, 9930 NW Justus Ln in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85260337132?pwd=admWuTE9fEltLcTptQjpyoCOY0ik6o.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 852 6033 7132 and passcode 864840.

Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Tan (The Garden of Evening Mists) explores the power of storytelling in this intoxicating outing. At Cassowary House in Penang, Malaya, in 1921, Lesley Hamlyn prepares to receive “Willie” Somerset Maugham, the famed English writer and friend of her husband, Robert. Increasingly drawn to Willie–who is desperate for new material for a novel to stave off bankruptcy–Lesley gradually unburdens herself to the author, unearthing a trove of long-buried secrets ranging from the personal to the political. Tan seamlessly merges fact and fiction as he explores the underlying tensions in both Lesley and Willie’s marriages, as well as Lesley’s intriguing involvement with the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen during his 1910 sojourn in Penang. A side plot involves Lesley’s friend Ethel Proudlock, another real-life figure, who stood trial for the murder of her fellow Englishman in Kuala Lumpur. As in Tan’s other works, the narrative dwells on memory and loss, its lush, dreamy prose evoking the bygone days of colonial pre-WWII British Malaya amid musings on life’s ephemeral nature, while never losing its eye for injustice: “For a woman to be remembered,” Lesley laments, “she has to either be a queen or a whore. But for those of us who lead normal, mundane lives, who will remember us?” This is a stunner.

October 2027 Book Club Selection

Harris, Jessica B: High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (2012)

Discussion: Thursday, October 14, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Betsy Samuels, 3737 NE Marine Dr (Rose City Yacht Club) in Portland. Anytime on or after October 7, please call or text Betsy at 503-701-6218 for the gate code. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81940859173?pwd=0pIfZZhToDV6GLb1tGzh2LcB7WeamM.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 819 4085 9173 and passcode 407036.

Review: ©Booklist: Acclaimed cookbook author Harris (The Africa Cookbook, 1998) tells the story of the African diaspora through food, from the foodstuff brought along with African slaves to barely maintain them on the Middle Passage to the undeniable imprint of African American cuisine on southern American and Caribbean food. She traces African foods (yams, okra, black-eyed peas, corn), flavoring, cooking methods, and food rituals from the abduction of Africans and enslavement in the Americas to travel throughout the American and European continents, recounting tribulations and joy. Along the way, she profiles famous and obscure but gifted cooks; cooks in the big houses of slave plantations; Pig Foot Mary, who grew wealthy from sales of food she cooked on a stove mounted on a baby carriage; chefs who served meals to presidents; and members of a cooperative of black hoteliers in Philadelphia in the nineteenth century. Along with historical context, Harris offers recollections from her own travels and ends with selected recipes. Photographs enhance this passionate perspective on the culinary history of the African diaspora.

November 2027 Book Club Selection

Johnson, Adam: The Wayfinder (2025)

Discussion: Tuesday, November 9, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Ann and Roger Crockett, 1922 NE 12th Ave in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83296893650?pwd=aCY9amnIxOAiWacT4qpDU3Myvur1Ic.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 832 9689 3650 and passcode 798424.

Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: The Polynesian islands in the South Pacific are transformed by this historical epic into a region at once otherworldly and recognizable. The Pulitzer Prize–winning Johnson (The Orphan Master’s Son, 2012) has established a reputation for spinning complex, colorful, and plausibly rococo yarns from civilizations remote from and mysterious to outsiders. Here, his audacious, unruly imagination roams with confidence through the island kingdom of Tonga as it undergoes societal uncertainty and the potential of war with other islands. At or near the center of this whirlwind is Kōrero, bold and insatiably curious daughter of a fisherman and a tattoo artist, whose discovery of a fishhook-shaped pendant in an ancestral graveyard signals the beginning of a grand, perilous, and transfiguring adventure that puts her, her family, and her friends on a sea voyage whose outcome could mean either salvation or oblivion for their people. The perilous odyssey is led by a figure known only as the Wayfinder, whose near-intuitive grasp of navigation by both the shifting waters and the celestial patterns of the night sky arouses in Kōrero her own aspirations of being a “way finder.” Telling stories, however, is her own means of navigating through the twists and turns of her life’s journey, and Johnson’s multilayered narrative has the baggy, wildly divergent feel of oral storytelling, in which the intrigues of royal power politics, often facilitated through violence, are woven with tales of familial conflict, verse by royal poets, and even the occasional monologue from Kōkī, the most articulate and, it seems, resilient of the islands’ many parrots. Such enchanted touches are deftly threaded into the rangy storyline by Johnson’s richly lyrical prose, which is also capable of handling the social dynamics of the Tongans along with the background stories of royalty and their rivals. At times, the saga can get so discursive that it risks leaving the reader on some reef or capsized by an unexpected surge from another time. Yet somehow, you yield to the novelist’s evocation of a world that, like the pendant recovered at the novel’s start, feels “both ancient and startlingly new.” A book stuffed with revelations while keeping many secrets.

December 2027 Book Club Selection

Barragán, Carlos: The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers (2026)

Discussion: Monday, December 6, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Mike Waite, 7008 Kansas St in Vancouver WA. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87204312635?pwd=RaKdd3cde2aYNKwQmDjPNMRActH9BH.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 872 0431 2635 and passcode 761090.

Review: ©Publishers Weekly: This outstanding debut from New York Times reporter Barragán explores the lives of Nigerian scammers who use seduction as part of their grift. Having initially traveled to Lagos to find a Nigerian man who romanced and scammed his mother, Barragán ends up closely following four such “Yahoo Boys” (so named after the email service). They include Chibuike, who strings along an Irish mother for years by posing as professional wrestler Cody Rhodes, and Richie, who fears that a woman in Kentucky may have died because of his scam. Along the way Barragán delves into how romance scams work–using fake social media accounts, the scammers seduce Western men and women into buying them gift cards–as well as the Yahoo Boys’ lavish lifestyles and the lengthy pre-internet history of “impersonation scams” in Nigeria. There are plenty of eye-popping details, including alarmingly manipulative chats between the scammers and their victims, and even more nefarious alleged strains of Yahoo, including Yahoo Plus, in which scammers use “supernatural forces” to attract victims, and Yahoo Plus Plus, which “was rumored to entail ritual killings.” Yet the book is most noteworthy for its affecting humanization of both the Yahoo Boys–Barragán shatters the image of romance scammers as part of “well-organized Mafia-like syndicates,” instead revealing them as impoverished young men scrambling to survive–and of their victims, made vulnerable by the West’s loneliness epidemic. It’s a remarkably empathetic view of both sides of the con.