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His Only Wife

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I didn’t like how she ignored Muna’s position as the person her husband had been involved with first. I’m not Ghanaian but I am West African with my own African Aunties and Uncles in the village and I recognized them one hundred percent in authenticity. And if you're looking for a 100% HEA to this Ghanaian "romance," you won't find it, but the ending is understandable and satisfactory.

I felt like there were too many plotholes and I don't know why I thought this would be an African thriller in the same vein of My Sister, the Serial Killer — it wasn't. Those conditions could include more of the intimacies between Muna and Eli that Afi glimpses in their home, intimacies that mirror or maybe even exceed Afi and Eli’s best moments. Therefore, it seemed a little out of place later when she made it seem like she was being cheated on when she came in as the latter day entrant to the “polygamous” relationship. Thanks to Netgalley and Workman Audio for the copy of an audiobook in exchange for an honest review. It's a style of novel I like quite a lot, one that opens up a place and time to you, letting you see it in intricate detail.As time passes, and Afi begins studying fashion and bonding with her brother-in-law's lover, she begins to chafe against the constraints imposed by the Ganyos, who time and again tell her not too demand too much from her husband, and remind her—subtly and not—of the advantages brought by her marrying 'upward'.

I would have easily read another hundred pages that allowed Afi to learn more of Muna’s side of the story about Eli and the Ganyos, and allowed readers like me to unravel our ingrained assumptions about “the other woman. Issues that Adzo Medie unearths right from the start of the novel reach beyond the contemporary feminist narrative and the concept of equality. Usually can't stand other women being blamed for men not having their shit together, so first trigger.

I also wish that we could have seen more of Afi without the Ganyos (for example scenes while she's studying fashion would have been nice, or even her socialising with more people outside of her apartment). Oneworld has snapped up Nightbloom by Peace Adzo Medie, bestselling author of Reese’s Book Club pick His Only Wife. Initially I thought His Only Wife might be reminiscent of Lola Shoneyin's The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, but that notion is quickly disavowed with Afi's arrival in Accra. Eli loves a woman his family will not accept, and the marriage is their power move to get him to leave the other woman once and for all.

We never meet Muna, but the family’s objections to her seem to be based on the facts that she is dark skinned and isn’t interested in impressing the family. Comparing both relationships in terms of each party’s treatment of the other could’ve allowed this novel to shed some light on the possibilities of ethical non-monogamy and polyamory. These expectations expose the simultaneous beauty and burden of family, which can be both comforting (such as Afi’s relationship with her cousin Mawusi) and a source of intense strife (such as the relationship with her uncle Pious.Quotidian spaces and seemingly ordinary conversations lead to fraught disagreements and disconcerting realisations. The book is set in Ghana and narrated by Afi – a young woman who lives with her widowed mother in a small town, and works as a seamstress. When I read those words, I thought surely this novel was set in the past because who does that in the present.

Peace Adzo Medie’s debut novel, His Only Wife, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, and a Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020. Afi’s uncle, the head of the Tekple family, saw significant financial relief in the wealth and kindness of Elikem Ganyo, a successful young businessman from the country’s capital. Her Aunty, her brother-in-law, and her mother try to placate her anxiety, telling her tall-tales about the 'Liberian woman' who has brainwashed him and of Elikem's daughter poor health. Set in Ghana, this book is kind of a subtle take-down of patriarchal values through the medium of a domestic drama. While the tension between Afi and the rest of the characters made for some pretty absorbing scenes, I found myself growing increasingly frustrated by Afi.Feel free to thoroughly curse me out if I say anything in my review that is disrespectful to the culture in the book. Still, I kept turning the pages in urgency as if my continuous presence in the story would help save the heroine.

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