“Sometimes the best person to listen to is the person who did exactly what you don’t want to do. Don’t let what your grandparents or your mother or anyone else wants or wanted influence you now”
Dara, Amaka and Lillian, all of Nigerian heritage, are currently expats living in Singapore. Dara is a lawyer, Amaka is a banker and Lillian was a pianist who moved from the U.S with her American husband. They are all living the lives they have created for themselves in Singapore, while each fighting their own battles until a new arrival, Lani steps in and affects their lives in different ways.
This was an okay read for me. It had an intriguing premise but I think I wavered on the execution. One minute, I found myself invested in the characters because Fadipe did a good job in fleshing them out and you get a good sense of who they are and how they are handling their various predicaments. We get a good grasp of their background and their families and the connection and friendships between each other, also made sense. Dara’s struggle as a black woman in a law firm, Amaka dating a non-Nigerian and not seeing it as long term and Lillian feeling lost and trying to find her place were all realistic.
But then the next minute, it just felt like the drama was never ending and it was being stretched out for no reason and because I was itching for a resolution, the characters started becoming annoying. I specifically found Dara to be bratty. The pace picked up the second half of the book and because so much was happening, I didn’t know how I felt. So much was going on and I didn’t have the bandwidth to care deeply for all of them. That’s the other thing, be prepared for a million and one stories going on at the same time.
I did this book on audio and I honestly wouldn’t recommend doing audio, if you are Nigerian. The narrator had a British accent and was fine for the general narration but when it came to pronouncing the Igbo names, the pronunciation was terrible and in the little Igbo spoken, it was butchered. Her American accent was such struggle bus and it had me cringing and the last straw for me was when she read out the famous 1004 apartments as 10-04 vs. one thousand and four. There were also a bunch of volume or tone fluctuations where you could tell the difference from when she picked it up at a different time.
Overall, as mentioned above, I didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it either. I do think that it was a decent read that serves well as a filler read or reading palate cleanser. I think it is obvious that this is a debut book but I would still check out other books by her.
Taynement
TwoNightStands 