Literary fiction. A family novel focused on a mother and her twin daughters. The mother, for her entire life, is seen by most as not-quite-right or worse, though her own narrative of things is rather different. And the twins, one straight and one queer, are sent on very different trajectories after a “bad thing” happens when they are children. The story ranges across Nigeria, the UK, and Canada, and from the mother’s birth to the daughters’ adulthood, and it is centred on the return home to Lagos of the daughters after many years away. The writing is wonderful and I enjoyed the story very much. There are times in fiction, particularly literary fiction I think, when trauma or bad choices or harmful behaviour can put distance between the reader and the characters or the text as a whole – indeed, particularly in certain kinds of masculinist literary fiction, it’s hard to imagine how this could be anything other than the point, given what’s on the page – but what I liked most about this book was that in the face of the bad things that are part of any life, the bad choices, the harms done, the undercurrent of welcome and even love from the text was strong enough that it made me actively want to linger in it. There were a few moments that pulled me out, of course – a few passages that were a little didactic, for instance, as with some of the scene-setting when one of the daughters is in Halifax. And I remain a little uncertain what I think about the ending, which kind of feels like it resolves too much, too neatly…but then again I like it, and it feels like that resolution has been earned through how the book was put together and through the bittersweet aspects that happen simultaneously. Anyway…very much liked this one. It’s a debut, and I can’t wait to see what she writes next.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.