Stay with Me

Finished this a few days ago, but am still thinking about it. It is a sad and enlightening book about Nigerian views toward women who do not/cannot bear children, and an amazing debut novel. Since I've already read a debut novel for the 2017 Read Harder Challenge, I am using this to fulfill the “Read a book wherein all point-of-view characters are people of color” category.

I loved the storytelling in this book as it was engaging but I didn't like a single character in this book (not that I think I was meant to) and the ending just fell a little flat to me.

I loved the way they highlighted important bits of Nigeria's history such as the rampant insecurity, rigged elections and the coups but they didn't dwell too much on it as it was something that was common and citizens had to simply live with it.

Generally when I pick up a book with infertility and pregnancy as the plot, it's by accident, and I'm disappointed. This one was also picked up by accident, but WOW was I surprised by how much I loved it. The characters are complex and feel like real people, the plot is emotionally gripping, and I mourned Yejide's losses more than I expected to.

I liked the basic concept, but the novel never fully clicked for me. I expected a psychological portrait of a couple that is unable to conceive children in a very patriarchal rules-bound society. But the narrative relied too much on different perspectives, time jumps and twists to really let the characters sink in. Same with the mythological side stories, they functioned as interesting elements, but didn't organically weave into the narrative.

A hard one to rate, because it's a decent book, but it didn't fulfil my expectations, which always makes me judge it harsher. I'd go 2, but the writing is good, so 3.

Reading Stay With Me, I think a lot about the tension between the old and the new, the past and the present. I think about how the ways things were done before, and the way we would like to do them now; I think about the inherent conflict that exists when the past and the present do not reconcile well. I think about how, these days, many people are craving the “good old days” and making decisions that take us back to an older time, without realizing the effects of those “old days” on the people who were maligned back then. This is a story about family, pregnancy, politics, business, and marriage. It is also a story of the tension between what once was and what now could be.

(originally published on inthemargins.ca)