This book got a tremendous amount of praise when it first came out and I have to admit that I’m basically baffled as to why. It’s Adebayo’s debut novel and it’s the tale of a dysfunctional married couple in Nigeria and the way their efforts to have a child ultimately tear them apart. I found the prose to be fine at best and pretty bad at worst, honestly. I kind of feel like Adebayo wasn’t up to the task she set herself and, fine, whatever, it’s a first novel. We see so many first novels these days heralded as “stunning debuts” or whatever so we kind of forget maybe that the reason great debuts are “stunning” is because most debuts are pretty bad. This one certainly is. The problem with the prose isn’t just that it’s often quite clunky, it’s that it fails to bring the characters to life. Adebayo is trying to create a portrait of transcendent suffering, but she just isn’t up to it and instead it just kind of feels like she really loathes the characters and is just humiliating them over and over. At one point, one of the main characters loses control of his bowels and ***** himself in public. I mean, that’s not tragedy; that’s a kind of farcical idea of tragedy. Hamlet never **** himself. The book is also narrated by both the husband and the wife in alternating chapters, but, as a perfect example of how the prose fails, their voices are exactly the same. There’s nothing in the prose itself to distinguish between the two of them and I’m not sure what the point is if they’re going to just sound exactly alike. Anyway, I just really hated the characters in this book; that’s not a deal breaker, honestly – there’s nothing wrong with unlikable characters, even main characters. But they don’t have the requisite humanity to feel real and complex; they only feel stupid and selfish and like they’re being victimized by the author. It’s a very emotionally manipulative book. There’s no easier way to make something hard to read than by describing children suffering and Adebayo spends a lot of time on that in this book, but since there’s no depth, it just makes the book feel kind of ugly. Anyway, I have no idea what anyone saw in this book. It’s bad. No question. And don’t get me started on that horrible ending where Adebayo seems to think she’s redeeming a character, but instead she’s only making the character feel like an even worse person. 1 star.
tl;dr – bad prose, hateful characters, an author reaching for tragedy but only reaching humiliation; I have no idea why this debut was so praised. 1 star.