What I kept thinking as I read this was man, Adichie really despises academics, and has a special place of rage reserved for ‘woke’ African American scholars. She is absolutely vicious skewering the hypocrisy and self-congratulatory elitism of Americans lecturing Africans about race. And while some of the critique is no doubt valid, it reads as hyperbolic, and bitter, and distracts from the rest of the story.
This novel felt, frustratingly, like a retread of the previous books, except not as effective. Adichie’s prose is magnetic as ever, but the novel flounders, and seems undecided about what it really wants to do. It’s ostensibly the story of 4 different women, but as the novel continues, it becomes obvious that one of them is the real center of interest, and the others really fall by the wayside. And to complicate matters, this primary story is based on a real event, but one that took place in 2011, and in this novel, it gets moved to 2020ish. I say ish, because the timelines in the novel are extremely fuzzy. This is part of what makes it so weird — on the one hand, Adichie seems interested in realism, and in something like historical fiction. But on the other, she really doesn’t seem to want to illuminate the world of her characters all that much. The most obvious symptom of this disinterest is the pandemic, which she perhaps can’t bear to really describe, so instead there’s a fair amount of lead up, and then seemingly some emergence from lockdown, but it all seems quite external to the characters’ lives and to what’s happening to them. As well, that primary story, with its recognizable central event feels so clearly out of context, like something is off — which is unfortunate, because the way she fictionalizes the event and imagines the character is really interesting.
I really like her writing, and I was so excited to read this novel, but it really flopped for me.
Kasia Reads 