I hate writing reviews for books that I didn’t like (especially since it seems whenever I write anything less than complimentary, the authors contact me and try to convince me that I’m wrong), so I’ll say, for Stay With Me, that the book works better in theory than in practice. In theory: when a wife fails to fall pregnant, her inlaws convince her husband to take a second wife. In practice: facile characters who behave with no more depth than a child’s puppets made from construction paper and popsicle sticks. As an example: the second wife. It wouldn’t have been out of place for her to cackle maniacally. There’s no examination of what she is getting out of the arrangement. She exists solely as a foil for the main character to rage against.
I was excited to read this book. Sadly, it’s one of those books where melodrama replaces character depth. Books like this make me feel manipulated: of course I’m going to feel badly for people in sorry situations (infertility under a dictatorship), but when there’s no further complexity to the characters other than their sorry situations, when the characters are defined solely by their sorry situation, I’m going to get frustrated. And I got frustrated.
Boo.
(Hopefully too Ms Adebayo isn’t going to write me something to tell me I’m a jerk for not liking her novel. Fingers crossed.)
Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo went on sale August 22, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.