I’m now the kind of person that reads one book each month; what has become of me?

While we’re still figuring out the answer to that, in October, I read You Made A Fool Of Death With Your Beauty, my third book by Akwaeke Emezi.

The first being The Death of Vivek Oji (5/5), absolutely loved it. Then, Fresh Water (4/5), was like a spin on traditional spirituality and their western interpretations (for lack of a better explanation), very unique, loved it; so when my friend recommended this one, I decided to look into it.

SYNOPSIS:

The focal point of this book is loss, grief, and learning to find yourself amid it. It follows the main character Feyi, who’s just starting to live her life following a tragic accident that killed the love of her life. She starts up with a short-lived situationship with a sexually available, but emotionally unavailable man. When that runs its course, she moves on to a more stable love interest, but she’s scared of jumping into anything serious as she’s still dealing with her grief. The more stable love interest Nasir, decides to take things slowly. In the spirit of starting off as just friends, he invites her to a totally platonic ‘work vacation’ at his father’s resort back home. What better place to find love than an island? The problem, there’s someone else in the house that’s piqued her interest, and it’s the one person that’s off-limit.

RATING & REVIEW: ★★★

I liked the other two books by the author because they were unique in some sense, but this one, it read like it lacked something and tried to overcompensate somehow.

Especially with the grief, it’s like the author decided to use that to excuse the character’s behaviour. Oh, and dear reader, just in case you’re almost at the end and you still think, I don’t agree with her, how about this call from her first-night stand absolving her of any guilt?

It’s almost like the author realised they had not done a good job of selling us the ‘because of love’ narrative and then decided to pull out one last card from their sleeve.

And then there was the whole thing with villainising Nasir with violence and a sense of entitlement. That thing authors do when there’s a love triangle and they’re unable to dispose of one counterpart, so they turn them into a caricature of a villain, very tasteless.

Alim, on the other hand, he felt like smoke, he was not a strong character in my opinion. This’s funny considering it’s a book, but he felt like he was scripted. Their interactions felt like a bunch of relationship tweets I’d see on my timeline on a bad day.

Honestly, the most interesting thing to happen in this book happened in the first scene.

In summary, I felt the book was pretentious, it was hypocritical, but I’m giving it 3 stars, because it’s one of those books where it’s not bad but I’m not the target audience.

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If you’ve read this or any other book by the author, let me know your thoughts! If you’re looking to start something from this author, I recommend starting with The Death Of Vivek Oji.