Liked this one much less than the previous two in the series, and way less than everything else Rick Riordan has written. Review is now up on the blog.

The writing is too pretentious for me, but it does handle some interesting topics!

Very happy I picked this up again, the second half is wonderful :)

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I loved some of the chapters - the one about her daughter was especially moving and beautiful. However, I was also annoyed with a lot of them. This is a very self indulgent memoir, it's me me me all the time, everything is about the author. Even when she almost drowns her son it's about her. She's reckless and doesn't learn from her mistakes, continuously putting herself in danger for really stupid reasons. I like memoirs in which the writer reflects on their mistakes and works through their errors, and she just doesn't seem to do that. I wish she was more apologetic, and genuinely analysed her mistakes, as opposed to finding excuses, such as her need for freedom and rebellion, for repeating them over and over again.

The writing, I have to say, is stunning. Sometimes she overdoes the imagery, making it all a bit heavy to read, and I often found myself drifting off and not paying attention, because she was just putting the same thing into too many different words. But that is perhaps just because I like very straightforward writing.

A lot of people love this book, so I would recommend it if it seems like your kind of thing - it just wasn't what I wanted it to be.

This prose poetry novella explores interesting themes in a really fresh way: colonialism, moving overseas, the meaning of home, the value of postcolonial nationalism, women in both European and African society, and more.

The writing was interesting and quite beautiful - but overall, the book left me pretty untouched. I didn't feel connected to the characters, felt neither good nor bad for them, and I think at times the poetry paragraphs took me out of the story, making me focus too much on the language for me to appreciate the humanity of the story.

I didn't dislike the book by any means, and I look forward to examining it closely in my dissertation, but as a reading experience I found it pretty average.