Book Review: The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré

The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My in person book group decided not to read this one from a choice of two debut novels, reasons included the possibe difficulties with dialect! I was dissappointed by this and read it anyway. I had read reviews which said it preached down to readers, and asked why the author had invented a new broken English for the Yoruba speaking girl narrator of the story. Nigeria has a pidgeon which I suppose shecould have used but for me at least that always remained more unintelligible than trying to chat to the market seller in my broken Hausa.
I sped along with this book from the word go, I found its characters full of life and very real to me. The internal dialog its narrator is having with herself and her interactions with others is an age old story which sadly still happens - child marriage to pay of family debts, indentured labour/slavery, domestic violence, cruelty of power, class/tribe/language divisions in society, the (non)place of woman, lack of education, lack of opportunity, lack of empowerment etc. But Adunni has a dream. Yes the book has a happy ending, and I was glad it did, and it did not feel forced. Neither did her voice, perfectly narrated on the audiobook by the class voice over artist, Adjoa Andoh. Adunni's voice is engaging, funny, insightful, niave, hopeful - as a reader we feel her pain and jump with her in her moments of joy.
As a debut novel I think this is extremely good. What Abi Dare has succeeded in doing is to totally engage her reader, create good characters to tell a good story, and perhaps as importantly make her reader put her on their following list as they impatiently await her next novel. Very well done 'O!

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Book Review: Freshwater by Akweake Emezi

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A most intriguing read.

The author is on my list of Nigerian writers to read and I wanted to start with her first novel which this is. Akwaeke Emezi is Igbo/Tamil, raised in NIgeria, living in USA. She won the 2017 Commonwealth short story prize for Africa with her short story Igbo cultural cosmology. This book is the story of a young woman, abused to the point of self disintegration and the multiple personalities as they would be called in the North which materialise as she struggles through her youth, spiraling out of control through disastrous sexual encounteres and self mutilations. The author tells the young woman's story through her various voices, showing the reader how these difering daemons play out in her rollercoaster of a life. They are written as if they were spirits, gods in her body, trapped within the marble of her mind from which sometimes one, sometimes another and sometimes the girl herself are to the fore in her daily life.

A bit of context is useful to understanding this - The Igbo use the term ogbanje to denote an essentially evil spirit, the "children who come and go" which from birth to puberty cycle through death and return causing much grief to the family. Female circumcision is thought to get rid of them. The high female god Ala is the goddess of earth, fertility, mortality who holds the deceased in her womb, is the guardian of women and rules the underworld. Her messenger on earth to the living is the Python. Tributes to her are paid during the annual Yam Festival.

Ada has been named after the Python, and the spirits inside her, the personalities are obanje. This is a survival story, the story about coming to terms with the trauma of abuse and finding who you are after it.

It is an incredibly ambitious first novel. Does it work, does Emezi bring it off? To a certain extent yes. She clearly is an imaginative, highly creative writer or budding talent. For me the novel was a bit too long and I felt the story could have been improved by a compression. But yes she does give you an insight into the young women's mental state without it being bathed in the usual jargon and metaphors. The struggle for control is there, the despair, the need for escape, to blot out the unidentifiable trauma, the desperation. I most certainly will read more by her.

Book Review: Ordinary People by Diana Evans

Ordinary People by Diana Evans
My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I very seldom trash a book but this has been the most boring book I have ever read. It was my in person book club choice for this month and I've managed about half way through it and that was a stretch so as a Christmas present to myself I am giving up on it! It is everything I dislike in a a novel - domesticity abounds, huge amount of dialog such that it almost reads like a script, characters I have absolutely no interest in and who have nothing interesting happening to them. It is set in a part of London I know and granted her desciptions of the area ran true - and that's my only positive about this book. I read reviews about it praising its prose and insight Guardian Review but I just don't get it, I'm just not reading the same book. For me it lived up to its title Ordinary. More enticing reads await.

Book Review: My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, narrated by Weruche Opia

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite,  narrated by Weruche Opia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I loved this book, listening to the audio I felt re-submersed in Nigeria, the culture, the colour, the language, the way women are with their hair, their clothes and with the relationships between Nigerian women and Nigerian men, be they fathers or lovers or predators. For many dependency still rules, for many the man still rules hard in the home, for many the route to education and success has many obstacles. Sisters Korede and Ayoola have and always will have only each other, it is a beyond sisterly bond ++++SPOILER ALERT ****forged in the darkness of a hinted at, but never fully enunciated, episode which straddled the domestic and business worlds where a girl child is safeguarded at all costs until the price or prize is too great to ignore, the business deal worth too much.

We know from the beginning, indeed from the title, that Ayoola, the beautiful, is a killer, a serial killer, prone to knocking off her suitors. The novel opens with the line “Korede, I killed him.” We quickly find out that Korede her elder, plainer sister, helps clean up her mess and is complicit in body disposal of at least one of Ayoola's victims. The true extent of her involvement becomes apparant only as the book progresses. But who really is the victim here, and a victim of what? Who is exploiting who? The story line answers these questions in part and leaves the reader pondering them further even at the end of the book.

The novels oscillates rapidly in its scences, its chapters are small, tiny compare with what is more usual length. But the characters are just as full, their story just as powerful - Karode's father confessor type relationship with the comatose Muhtar, her admiration and love for Tade, the doctor and her fruitless attempts to keep her work life, and Dr Tade, apart from her home life and her sister. She is an extremely competent woman, used to thinking on her feet, handling the bureaucracy and corruption of Nigerian officials, dealing with and managing all types - skills you feel she learnt at a very early age from her dodgy deals father.

This is begging to be made into a movie under the deft hands of a good scriptwriter who gets the sharp humour, the situational comedy, but also its serious sociopolitical backdrop and, not least, the psychological profile of each of the sisters and their unique bond. As a first novel I though this was excellent and no surprise that it was longlisted for the 2019 Booker.

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Review: Kelemo's Woman by Molara Wood

Kelemo's Woman by Molara Wood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This short story can be found at http://www.eclectica.org/v11n3/wood.html and in Molara Wood’s short story collection Indigo

This is the story of the choices made by a young Nigerian woman at the time of a military coup. Her mother has died and she is alone except for Kelemo who is a political activist. They have to spend their lives 'ducking and diving' trying to keep one step ahead of the authorities. She has nothing and has no identity outside of being “Kelemo’s Woman”. On her death bed her mother bemoans her own life spent in the wake of men “Iriola, trust no one. Allow yourself to be pulled down by no one. I mean, no one. Don't be like me, slaving all my life to stand by men and for what? To die of a wasting disease before my time? Iriola, I beg of you. If the house is falling or the boat is sinking, secure for yourself a safe landing. A comfortable patch. Now you will have no mother. The person to watch over you, is you." When the soldiers come to her supposedly safe house what choices does Irioko make? How does she survive?

I think this story is one of those "glass half full - glass half empty" reads depending on how you read it, whether you read the mother's death bed words as urging Iroko to take the safe comfortable route to survival or to find a secure landing from which to get out from all the chaos.
Only in the direst conditions are we faced with the burden of such choices, we have no time to consider their consequences, no power to forgo making them, for they are placed on us by those weilding power. Only if we survive can we tell, can we expose. Think Sophie's Choice, think #MeToo.

For me its a story about survival, about the costs of survival, for the voiceless multitudes. It is about a Africa lost , be it to the wasting of HIV/AIDS, be it to post colonial vacuums caused by trying to continue the "British sitcom" only to end up being taken over by a game of chess, power played by groups of wannabees who are but boy soldiers exercising petty power. Tongue in cheek it may be saying it is time for change #NoMore

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