Category: literary fiction

“He sees what I see, but from the other side. A woman in between two selves, undecided as to which she can remain loyal”

The premise of the book is pretty simple. There is a wife who has a husband and a best friend. The best friend’s name is Temi (that’s the only name we get). Temi and wife’s husband hate each other and wife is in the middle seemingly not trying to take sides. The book is basically the telling of one night where the three of them hang out in Wife’s house, drink too much and let their bubbling resentments spill over.

“Doubt and truth are so close that it’s sometimes impossible to tell them apart”

I can’t tell you that I knew what direction the author was trying to take besides trying something different. The book had no quotation marks, paragraphs and like I said no character names – save for Temi. If I wanted to reach, I could say that the intention was to say that Temi is the only one with a strong identity but I am not going that far.

I have written before about whether it is possible to like a book with unlikeable characters. I say this because of the way I could not stand these three people. Temi because why are you so intrusive in someone else’s marriage even if they are your best friend? Showing up at all hours to their house and never leaving and judging her friend’s choices like choosing to get married. Wife because why the hell is your friend that involved in your life and mocking your husband and you join in laughing at him? and Husband for putting up with the shit and having low key misogyny.

The book reads like a novella and a thriller except I wouldn’t say I found it thrilling. It was like a thread just unraveling without any building excitement and instead building annoyance. Temi and Wife became friends because Temi “saved” Wife from the rules put on her by her Nigerian parents. But the irony is, Temi seemed to pick up where Wife’s parents stopped and wants to dictate Wife’s life and Wife lets her.

I couldn’t tell if Temi loved Wife romantically or if she loved Husband romantically. And I couldn’t tell if Wife even loved Husband (well technically we got the idea she wasn’t in love with him). My conclusion is that Agbaje-Williams wanted this book open to interpretation and each character represented something in society. The depiction of Nigerian culture was accurate though.

Overall, I think the book suffered from being a novel that came off as a short story. But the thing is, I can’t definitively say it didn’t work because I am sure there is an audience for it. I can admit being biased because the characters were so unlikable to me. I really hated the ending, and I couldn’t even believe that was the end. Since it’s a short book it’s one I’d say it wouldn’t hurt to read for yourself and come to your own conclusion.

Taynement

“Now hear me well—what is not yours is not yours o, even if you marry the person that has that thing. If it is not yours, it is not yours o.”

When Eniola’s father loses his job, his life becomes a series of unfortunate events. His family goes from a 3 bedroom apartment to a studio apartment for all 4 of them – his dad, his mum, Eniola and his sister, Busola. His dad falls into deep depression leaving his mum to cater for the entire family. Eniola tries to help his mother by running errands for the local tailor, begging on the streets and being as good as possible to avoid causing his parents any grief.

Wuraola is a beloved child of a rich renowned family. She’s a doctor doing her residency program and also dating Kunle, the son of an equally wealthy and ambitious politician. As they get engaged and their relationship becomes more volatile and violent, Wuraola is trapped between not shaming her parents and loving Kunle out of his madness.

When Eniola’s parents are forced to make a hard choice between educating him or his sister and a local politician takes an interest in him, it leads him down a path that leads to the destruction of two families.

“He stared back at her, unconcerned. She had always marvelled at his calm assurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune for granted. As though it were impossible that it would abide only for a spell. She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things.”

A Spell of Good Things delves into class privilege, politics, poverty, familial and societal expectations in Nigeria. We were introduced to Adebayo with Stay With Me and she doesn’t disappoint with her second book. Reading this book right after the recently concluded Nigerian elections and seeing the parallels really made me sad. Local politicians collecting young, barely teenage boys and turning them into murdering, kidnapping and election box snatching thugs for their own political ambitions and never giving them anything in return besides drugs, food and money.

This is a familiar story for anyone who grew up in Nigeria where our politics is extremely violent. It was so sad to see Eniola’s path to the eventual climax of the book and because we got a lot of his family’s history we can’t help but understand why he took the only option he had at that point.

“What if everything that is to happen has already happened, and only the consequences are playing themselves out?”

This book needed a better editor to tell Adebayo to hurry it up. The narrative started out meandering. I kept wondering where the book was even going. It took way too long for the narrative to start moving. We got so many unnecessary scenes that I personally felt added nothing to the story. Adebayo would spend so long describing things that added nothing to the scenes and I was fascinated that an editor didn’t ask her to cut them out.

When the narrative picks up, it really does but then it leads to such a saturation of events in the latter half of the book that could have been spread out and would have made the book much stronger than what we got. I also think that while I entirely sympathized with Eniola, I was very indifferent to Wura. Stay With Me packed such a punch and was such a delight to be immersed in and made you care about every single person in the book but unfortunately, that is not the case here.

My favorite character ended up being Wura’s mother whose story I found so interesting and would have loved to hear more about. How her elder sister raised the rest of them and sacrificed so much to ensure they all married rich men and all became first wives and then continued ensuring that they never had to depend on a man for the rest of their lives. It was amazing to read and every time Adebayo focused on her, I gobbled it all up.

“Time was unforgiving, it didn’t stop, not even to give people a chance to scrape themselves off the floor if they’d been shattered.”

I still definitely recommend this book despite some of my concerns. I think it’s a good story and I can’t wait to continue seeing where Adebayo’s career goes from here. I gave this book 3 stars on Goodreads.

Leggy