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Some reviews:

"She succeeds in illuminating a truth that can be difficult to grasp when your knowledge of Africa comes mostly through headlines: though the extreme events are what make the news, Africans, like people everywhere, go through most of their days living ordinary lives ... Okeowo is an excellent reporter, and she does an impressive job of condensing decades of complex history into a handful of paragraphs, but her true genius lies in profiling: she is capable of evoking empathy for her subjects in only a handful of lines."―The Times Literary Supplement

"Sad and lovely ... She collapses the physical and emotional space between her protagonists and her reader. We identify with people whom, at first, we might consider live unknowable lives ... The months of painstaking work, the discomfort, the danger that must have gone into these “simple” stories is invisible. The scaffolding of journalism is absent. What we are left with is a study of the human spirit struggling to be good even when the prevailing forces are pulling in the opposite direction." ―The Financial Times

"A rich and urgently necessary book ... Okeowo has taken their stories, crafted them in all their courage and complexity and placed them at the center of the story of what it is to be human."―The New York Times

"Beautifully written."―The Washington Post

"Astounding…. An urgent portrait of modern Africa."—Emerald Street (UK)

"Okeowo masterfully fleshes out her subjects, allowing them to come alive on the page while also capturing the complexities of contemporary African societies."―Foreign Affairs

"Challenging, frightening, and powerful."―The Austin Chronicle

"A razor-sharp peek into the tensions that separate and bind us."―Essence (November 2017)

"Gripping and sobering."―Winnipeg Free Press

"Okeowo’s compelling prose is lean but empathetic, reportorial and personal both in an individual and cultural sense; her own status as a biological African born in America who straddles two continents and two sensibilities – at minimum – infuses this work with a real urgency."―Ms. Magazine (Fall 2017)

"Alexis Okeowo, who was named a staff writer in late 2015, is continuing the tradition of the foreign correspondent who takes considerable personal risks driven by the conviction that all stories deserve to be told, particularly those that require a great deal of courage to uncover in the first place."―The Christian Science Monitor

"Evocative and affecting."―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Remarkable…. Okeowo writes with beauty and grace…. Refreshingly, she does not give in to easy answers…. Clear-eyed, lyrical, observant, and compassionate—reportage at its finest."―Kirkus (starred review)

"A Moonless, Starless Sky is a captivating look at the on-the- ground effects of extremist groups and the people who live their lives in spite of them."—Booklist

Praise:

"Finally, finally, finally--a humane, skillful storyteller with sound reporting instincts has dug into the middle of the stories we think we've already heard out of Africa. Alexis Okeowo can write prose as arresting as Ryszard Kapuscinski's, she's got Katherine Boo's big heart, but she has her own fresh way of approaching the work, one that is terribly overdue. Absolutely essential reading, period."―Alexandra Fuller, New York Times bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Quiet Until the Thaw

"Alexis Okeowo's startling and brilliant account of fierce horrors and tender hopes is one of the best records I have ever read of a world that has been made and remade time and again out of struggle and faith. Okeowo is just the kind of reporter we need to hear from when it comes to Africa, the 'new' old world: truthful, accurate, deep."―Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of White Girls

"Gripping and important read about African men and women taking on extremism."―Riz Ahmed

"From an abolitionist who once owned a slave to women basketball players in a war zone, Alexis Okeowo has an alert and thoughtful eye for the unexpected. The portraits and voices she brings us from Africa are so vivid that the reader can easily forget the determination and bravery it must have taken to gather them in these unhappy corners of the continent."―Adam Hochschild, New York Times bestselling author of King Leopold's Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts

"In A Moonless, Starless Sky, Alexis Okeowo has wandered as a reporter into some of Africa's most difficult and dangerous corners and delivered something remarkable: real characters, women and men, fully rendered."―Howard W. French, author of Everything Under the Heavens

"Spectacular reporting. Full of fresh, unexpected detail. If you want to get an immediate sense of the lives, both quotidian and extraordinary, of Africans in some of the continent's most troubled countries, read Alexis Okeowo's book."―William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barbarian Days

“Alexis Okeowo has gone to the hardest continent and come away with a series of tales about the fight against fanaticism and despair. The result is a deeply sensitive portrait of modern Africa and a microscope on the human condition in the most difficult circumstances.”―Dexter Filkins, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Forever War