Love is Colour is a delightful collection of thirteen short romantic stories, ten of which are based on folk tales and mythology from around the world, particularly from West Africa. Bolu Babalola’s approach is a unique one: rather than taking the plot of the tales and transplanting them, she takes the characters and themes and uses them to create a story in which women have their own agency, which led to many a delightful twist!

Read this and more reviews on my blog!

Although it’s a fairly short book, coming in at just under 300 pages, it’s definitely worth taking your time over and only reading one or two stories at a time. They all have vastly different settings and characters, and I enjoyed them all the more for having space between each one to really absorb each story. At the back of the book there is a list of the origins for each story, and for those I wasn’t familiar with I googled the original after reading Babalola’s version. Not only was it good to expand my knowledge and horizons with traditional tales, but it was very interesting to compare the short stories to the source material.

As with all short story collections, they can’t all be winners, and you’re bound to enjoy some more than others, but there weren’t any that I outright disliked, perhaps just some I was indifferent to. Initially my favourites were Attem, Scheherazade, Thisbe and one of the original tales, Orin, and after reading the author’s note at the back Zhinu also made its way up there. The way that Babalola weaves in the distinctive features of each myth were sometimes profound, sometimes entertaining, and always brilliant. For example, in Thisbe, Pyramus and Thisbe are next-door neighbours in a college dorm, where a crack in the wall means they can hear the goings-on in each other’s rooms. In Zhinu, the myth is originally about the constellations, so Zhinu is a literal ‘star’ in that she is a rising celebrity.

The real stand-out feature of this collection, however, is Babalola’s skill in the short story itself – especially romantic short stories. There were thirteen romances in this book, and each one of them was tender, heartfelt, and subtle. The characters and their settings were all vividly painted, and over the course of about twenty pages for each story she took you on their journey.

My least favourite story in the collection, which unfortunately did let it down a bit for me, was Nefertiti. I knew from reading other reviews that this was the only story with queer characters, and with a sapphic romance. Not only did I struggle to really connect with the characters and story in this one, but I wasn’t a fan of the setting – a misandrist mafia-style gang. As I said before though, it’s very rare to find a book of short stories where they’re all winners, and it certainly didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the other stories.

If this collection is anything to go by, Bolu Babalola is an ingenious writer, and I can’t wait to see what she writes next!