Just Read It

Here’s a round-up of my most recents reads

The Gosling Girl by Jacqueline Roy

Anyone who has read The Fat Lady Sings by Jacqueline Roy will know what a fantastic storyteller she is, with carefully crafted prose that will often leave you reeling from the impact. So I was so excited to see her latest work, The Gosling Girl, a moving and powerful thriller about a young woman, newly released from prison and attempting to rebuild her life under a new identity.

The novel explores themes around redemption, identity, love and betrayal. The main character though sympathetic is not always likeable. Add to that, the horrific nature of her crime, you are left facing the dark reality of the criminal justice system and whether offenders can ever be fully rehabiltated into society. Without losing empathy for her characters, Roy asks the questions that we often don’t want to confront.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

I listened to the audiobook of this novel over a series of train journeys to and from work. And to say that it had me in a chokehold (unfortunate choice of words, given one of the key scenes), is an understatement.

When Athena Liu, darling of the literary world suddenly dies, her best frenemy June Hayward publishes a yet unseen and unfinished manuscript of Athena’s as her own. For many this would be unthinkable, especially when June, a white woman, changes her pen name to the more ambiguously Asian-American sounding name of Juniper Song. But for June it’s an entitlement that she believes she has every right to. Question is can she get away with it?

This is a wickedly funny, satirical look at the publishing industry and what happens when professional and personal rivalries go unchecked.

Nearly All The Men In Lagos Are Mad by Damilare Kuku

A uproariously fun collection of short stories about love and relationships in Lagos.

A pastor’s wife going to absolute lengths to defend her husband against allegations of adultery. A woman held to account by her in-laws for taking a knife to her husband’s penis. A young woman in search of a white soulmate in Lagos.

These stories all contain elements of scandal and large doses of hilarity while underlining just how tough it is to love, date or be married. I came for the title and stayed for the well crafted stories by an author who clearly had as much fun writing the them as I did reading.

Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades

The adage “never judge a book by it’s cover” definitely came to mind when reading this literary debut from Daphne Palasi Andreades. Anyone expecting a relatively light-hearted story about growing up in Queens, New York, will be taken aback by the poetic prose and the incise and powerful narrative. A chorus of voices of different shades of brown share the experience of girlhood to womanhood, in such a way that as a Black woman, I was hard-pressed not to see myself in some of the stories. Beautifully written and thought-provoking, this was a summer favourite.

Standing Heavy by GauZ’

Ever wonder what goes through the minds of the security guards at your favourite store? Well, wonder no more in this sharply funny, intergenerational tale of the security guards working in Paris’ including at one of its best-known stores, Sephora.

Standing Heavy explores and incisively comments upon the politics of immigration against the backdrop of a consumerist society. Given the current political discourse about immigration in our post-Brexit world, this novel hits quite deep and though it does not offer any solutions, it does give voice, and rightly so, to those whose voices are often go unheard, or worse, are heard and ignored.