They could not have picked a worse company to hitch their wagon to nor a worse time to do so. It is late 2007, and the economy is on the cusp of the Great Recession when young Cameroonian immigrants Jende and Neni Jonga chase after the American dream in New York City. Despite lacking papers, Jende finds a job as chauffeur to one of Lehman's top executives, Clark Edwards. Juggling children and jobs, wife Neni works toward her ultimate goal, a pharmacy degree. The Jonga family's fate intertwines with the Edwardses', and both families are caught in the financial and emotional fallout following the Lehman collapse. The Edwards family verges on a caricature of the rich and troubled (Clark's wife, Cindy, is addicted to drugs, and son, Vince, sets off to India to find himself), but the Jongas are vividly realized, their struggles and petty concerns soulfully narrated, with sparkling dialog. The occasional melodramatic note notwithstanding, Mbue's first novel is a weighty meditation on the true collateral costs of that all-American pastime, the pursuit of happiness.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2016 Booklist

This heartfelt and intimate portrayal of African immigrants trying to make it in New York City around 2007 focuses on the family of Jende Jonga from Cameroon. He lands a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy finance industry boss and is then able to bring his wife, Neni, and their young son over from Africa. Neni enrolls in college and is hired as a cleaner and nanny for the family for whom Jende works, and they become more involved with these superrich people who have problems of their own. As the Wall Street financial crisis deepens, Jende loses his job, and their application for asylum is rejected. The incredible pressures of poverty, limited opportunities, and the grind of New York City and an uncertain future stress the family to the breaking point as a new baby is born and they struggle not to lose sight of their dream. -Mbue's debut portrays these individuals realistically and sympathetically as the stresses of surviving in New York City lead to marital difficulties and physical confrontations. VERDICT A fast-paced, engaging read with an interesting cross-cultural background. [See Prepub Alert, 2/8/16.]-James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From Cameroonian Mbue comes a debut novel about two immigrants struggling to find their footing in a new world. When Jende Jonga journeys to New York City from Cameroon in 2004 on a visitors' visa in hopes of obtaining a green card, he's sure his life will only improve. After saving up enough money to bring over Jende's wife, Neni, and six-year-old son, the family moves into an apartment in Harlem. Then Jende hits the jackpot in 2007 when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a wealthy Lehman Brothers executive. But working for the Edwardses isn't as cushy and above board as Jende expected. Clark's long hours at the office and frequent late-night "appointments" at the Chelsea Hotel raise red flags with his wife, Cindy. When Neni agrees to accompany the Edwards family to Southampton as a temporary nanny for their youngest son, she learns far more than she bargained for about Cindy's fragile mental state. Before long, the pressure of keeping what they know about Clark and Cindy-and the threat of deportation-becomes too much for the Jongas to bear, threatening the stability of their marriage and their ability to remain in a country they still can't call home. Mbue's reliance on overheard phone conversations to forward the plot makes for choppy reading, and the tenor of the Edwardses' rich-people problems is nothing new. But the Jongas are much more vivid, and the book's unexpected ending-and its sharp-eyed focus on issues of immigration, race, and class-speak to a sad truth in today's cutthroat world: the American dream isn't what it seems. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

THE YEARS 2007-9 were bad ones for America. The housing bubble burst, the auto industry was in free fall, unemployment rose as high as 10 percent, and Wall Street was at the edge of an abyss. It's just before this tumult that Jende Jonga, an immigrant from Cameroon and one of the central characters in Imbolo Mbue's debut novel, "Behold the Dreamers," arrives in New York with a visitor's visa and the hope that somehow he might transform his temporary status with a green card. Two years later, he sends for his wife, Neni, and their son, Liomi, who join him in Harlem. When we first meet Jende, he's on his way to a job interview, aiming to become a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, an executive at Lehman Brothers. Jende gets the job, and before long he's shuttling not only Clark but Clark's wife, Cindy, and their two children throughout the city. Mbue writes with great confidence and warmth, effortlessly inhabiting the minds of both Jende and his wife. Neni, balancing motherhood and her dreams of becoming a pharmacist, is particularly appealing; she thrums on the page, full of complexity and yearning. Only once, in a pivotal moment toward the end of the book, does she act out of character in a way that feels forced, but elsewhere her sense of her own transformation ("Maybe I'm becoming another person") struck me as a fresh take on the immigrant experience - providing not simply the jolt of being in a new place but also the jolt of taking on a new identity because of that place. Still, if it's place you want, the novel offers that too. Neni observes that "even in New York City, even in a place of many nations and cultures, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, preferred their kind when it came to those they kept closest." Jende's immigration lawyer tells him : "The police is for the protection of white people. . . . But not black men." Jende laments that "people in this country, always worrying about how to eat, they pay someone good money to tell them: Eat this, don't eat that. If you don't know how to eat, what else can you know how to do in this world?" As the story progresses, the plot, which is premised on a class divide, unfolds to reveal many more fissures crackling beneath the surface - immigration proceedings don't go well, marriages falter, friendships fail, children stray. There are a lot of spinning plates, and Mbue balances them skillfully, keeping everything in motion. Even more impressive is the vitality that gleams through the film of gloom as the story becomes less about what happens to the Jongas than about their efforts to make peace with their fate, whatever and wherever it might be. And yet, while the novel's setup is rich with possibility, Mbue doesn't always make the most of it. Within the confines of the car, Jende regularly overhears Clark's business conversations, but the words float through the narrative without consequence. When Lehman goes bankrupt, the event is devoid of context; it doesn't offer us a glimpse into much beyond Jende's panic, his fear that he'll lose his job. When Neni starts working for Cindy Edwards at the family's vacation house in the Hamptons, the conceit is ripe - the Jongas of Harlem pitted against the Edwardses of the Hamptons. But these places remain little more than signifiers. The living room of the Edwardses' porticoed mansion has an "all-white décor and large windows as if to never lose a view of the sky." In contrast, the Jongas' dark, fifth-floor walk-up apartment has a "threadbare living room sofa" and is "full of cockroaches." There's no deep exploration of the true gap between the two. Even so, "Behold the Dreamers" is a capacious, big-hearted novel. Near the end of it, Neni describes Am erica as "a magnificent land of uninhibited dreamers." That might aptly describe the book as well. CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ is the author, most recently, of "The Book of Unknown Americans."

The American dream is put to the test by the economic disaster of 2007. Among the spate of novels forged in the crucible of the previous decade, Mbue's impressive debut deserves a singular place. This diversely peopled and crisply narrated story follows the trajectories of two Manhattan families, one at the top of the social heap and the other at the bottom. In the foreground is Jende Jonga, an immigrant from Cameroon, his wife, Neni, studying to be a pharmacist, and their young son. When Jende, who has been working as a dishwasher, scores a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a muckety-muck at Lehman Brothers with a troubled wife and similarly aged son, the fates of the Jongas and the Edwardses become entwined. Except for a nagging immigration problem being handled by a lousy lawyer, things go very well at first. Jende loves dressing up in a suit and driving a Lexus while Clark conducts endless cellphone conversations and laptop machinations in the back seat. Neni excels in school and becomes pregnant with a child who will be born a U.S. citizen. Then, during her summer hiatus in the Hamptons, Mrs. Edwards hires Neni to help with child care. One day she finds her employer disheveled and crashed out at midday; around this time, Clark starts having Jende take him for one-hour visits to the Chelsea Hotel. Cracks in the Edwards marriage are paralleled by trouble for the Jongas, too. Yet the magnitude of the catastrophe makes itself clear only slowlyparticularly to immigrant eyes, dazzled by everything from shopping at Pathmark to the presidency of Obama to the freedom of Occupy protesters to demonstrate without being rounded up and thrown into prison. They will learn. Realistic, tragic, and still remarkably kind to all its characters, this is a special book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.