Two Nigerian older women, one a seamstress catering to the needs of the second woman, a rich lady whose son is getting married, are kidnapped and held for ransom. Taken together, each tells the other their life story leading up to their present circumstances.

This does exactly what it says it does on the tin. It’s competent and has a fairly good hook. But I just didn’t click with the voice. It was completely fine, but also uninteresting—focused on aspects of their lives that I found least desirable to spend time on.

It also felt quite predictable, as was the plot/beats as soon as you they establish each characters opening chapters, alternates their stories. The voice for each character also isn’t very distinct and it’s not rooted in a sense of place, which made it very hard to picture anything happening in the fiction. The only thing really described physically was food. There wasn’t much physicality to the interactions and especially when alternating between present day and 1978, it was a bit baffling to not depict what the Nigerian city even looked like. How did people dress? How did that change over time. Smells, sights, sounds—wasn’t interested in any of that, and how much does the average reader know about Enugu, Nigeria? I certainly didn’t know a thing.

The hook just wasn’t enough to keep me interested once it became apparent where it was all going early on. While their lives are interesting in so far as they are women overcoming adversity, it’s also exactly the challenges you expect, every time, with only one exception, which would be a spoiler. I liked the themes but those feel sort of perfunctory given the setup.

The narrative also retreads ground annoyingly, as it converges on the present time. The idea of the women telling one another their stories made me expect a bit of a different voice as well, but instead it turns into a first person narrative where it would be telling anybody the story, so it’s not diegetic whatever. That was the entire hook of the story for me! Then, in later chapters, we get to a point where one character is telling a part of the story we just read to them. So the stories we learn about feel incongruent with what is actually happening on the page. It undermines the entire structure of the book and the way in which the flashback chapters are presented. I don’t get the stylistic choices at all, I’m afraid.

I did finish it, as it is readable and well written in the chosen style. I think it’s just a case of the author not being into the same things that I am. Plenty of people love it; sad to say I am not one of them.