The Shadow King

Read 18/04/2021-04/05/2021

Rating 4 stars

Hirut, a woman with a long scar “that puckers at the base of her neck and trails over her shoulder like a broken necklace”, waits in Addis Ababa station for a man she hasn’t seen in almost 40 years. They are connected by a secret, one from history, involving Mussolini and Emperor Haile Selassie.

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Handmaid’s Tale to Red Dust Road

I’m a day late for November’s Six Degrees of Separation. I’m blaming my anxious refreshing of the Presidential election count page on The Guardian website yesterday. This month, Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best has given us a sort of free pass on the starting book. We’re starting our November chains with a book that ended a previous chain. For anyone new to Six Degrees, the general concept is explained here.

The Girl with the Louding Voice

Read 09/10/2020-15/10/2020

Rating 5 stars

Abi Daré’s first novel is set in Nigeria and views that country’s patriarchal society through the eyes of a teenage girl who wants something better for herself. It’s a sassy, political, heartwarming story that gripped me with its heart stopping moments and its message of hope.

Summer Book Reading Challenge – How did I do?

I did alright, as it happens. I managed ten books, seven of them from my original list.

Unbowed: One woman’s story

Read 27/07/2020-13/08/2020

Rating 3 stars

Book 9 in my 10 Books of Summer reading challenge, a substitution in the original list.

Unbowed is the memoir of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Muta Maathai. This remarkable Kenyan woman was a child during the period of the British war against the Kikuyu people. She became a scientist, educated in Kenya, the US and Germany. She joined the environmental movement and campaigned for the re-establishment of forest in Kenya and fairer representation of women in agricultural production. She was a powerful advocate for democracy in Kenya. Her ideologies put her in conflict with Daniel Arup Moi’s government, and placed her life in danger. She was the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This is what I gleaned from Maathai’s Wikipedia entry, after my best friend sent me a card printed by her sister, one in a series of inspirational women she had designed.

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Road to The Hearing Trumpet

Hello May. You’ve arrived quickly. But then again, maybe not that quickly. Maybe I was simply in a fog for most of April. Anyway, I’m on time for this month’s Six Degrees of Separation. This month, Kate has chosen Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as the first book in the chain. I wonder where this will lead.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Hold Tight to The Handmaid’s Tale

For August’s 6 degrees of separation, we’ve been asked to start with the last book we finished in the month of July.

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women

Read 17/07/2019-02/08/2019

Rating 3 stars

Read as part of the 20 Books of Summer readathon.

I accidentally started Women in Translation month early with this collection of short stories. I should have known that Angela Carter would include a few women whose first language isn’t English. After all, being a woman who doesn’t conform to the artificial notion of femininity isn’t an exclusively Anglophone thing.

Carter introduces her selections as being about women who aren’t really wicked or wayward, at least not all of them.

Kintu

Read 25/06/2019-05/07/2019

Rating 5 stars

I went to see Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi speak about her new book, a collection of short stories called Manchester Happened, not too long ago. At the event, she also spoke about her novel Kintu and the struggle she’d had to get it published. She talked about the lack of interest from British publishers and how it took the novel being published in the USA and being a success there for it to be picked up in the UK. It was an eye-opener to hear her say that the reason no publisher in Britain would take a chance on the book was because they didn’t believe that there was enough of an audience for the work.

Kintu is a masterpiece. A sprawling epic, it’s divided into six Books, each focusing on a different descendant of the first Kintu.

My Sister The Serial Killer

Read 17/05/2019

Rating 4 stars

What do you do when your sister keeps killing her boyfriends? You become her Cleaner. This is the situation Korede finds herself in when her sister Ayoola kills three of her boyfriends on the trot.