I Do Not Come to You by Chance
Ratings3
Average rating4
"This is a fast, fresh, often hilarious first novel, by one of the remarkably talented young African writers who are rapidly making everyone else look stale" The Times Kingsley is fresh out of university, eager to find an engineering job so he can support his family and marry the girl of his dreams. Being the opara of the family, he is entitled to certain privileges - a piece of meat in his egusi soup, a party to celebrate his graduation. But times are hard in Nigeria and jobs are not easy to come by. For much of his young life, Kingsley believed that education was everything, that through wisdom, all things were possible. But when a tragedy befalls his family, Kingsley learns the hardest lesson of all: education may be the language of success in his country, but it is money that does the talking. In desperation he turns to his uncle, Boniface-aka Cash Daddy-an exuberant character who suffers from elephantiasis of the pocket. He is also rumoured to run a successful empire of email scams. But he can help. With Cash Daddy's intervention, Kingsley and his family can be as safe as a tortoise under its shell. It is up to Kingsley now, to reconcile his passion for knowledge with his hunger for money, to fully assume his role of first son. But can he do it without being drawn into this outlandish milieu?
Tags
Genre
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
[b:I Do Not Come to You by Chance 6265288 I Do Not Come to You by Chance Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1236695900s/6265288.jpg 6448541] is fascinating from the stand point of the setting. As a novice on Nigerian culture & history, I found Nwaubani's loving and honest depiction fascinating. Kingsley's struggle as the opara of his family, who is therefore obligated to provide for his younger siblings and ailing mother, but who doesn't have the “long-leg” to get a job using his degree is both manifestly Nigerian and understandable to anyone who has loved academia. Nwaubani takes care to paint the “419 scams” as both necessary and repulsive, successfully depicting a morally ambiguous area.However, the book falls flat of the mark when it comes to pacing. The plot, such as it is, goes little further than the back of the book and somehow stretches across 400 pages. Character development is fleeting (the only development I noticed was when Kingsley finally realized that he had been either doing what his father said or what Cash Daddy said his whole life, which he realized almost word-for-word as I have typed and then did not reflect on that or change his behavior at all.) The setting alone was not enough to hold my interest; a huge part of the appeal of the book for me was hoping to see change & when I realized none was forthcoming, I finished the last 100 pages at a run mostly to get it finished.
DNF at 10%. Maybe this was an audiobook thing, but it was hard for me to get into what was going on. It took about this long to even get a mention of 419 scams (even in an offhand manner), and at this point I was already losing interest in the flat characters. Putting it down for something else.
