The Middle Daughter

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Mother sets up a business that would bring her enormous wealth, but ultimately puts her at odds with Nani. The Middle Daughter is largely told from the perspective of three characters; Nani, Ugo (her younger sister), and her husband, Ephraim. Udodi’s death was the beginning of the raging storm but at that moment, we thought that the worst had already happened, and that life would treat us with more kindness.

The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe - Books on Google Play The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe - Books on Google Play

Unigwe raises the stakes of the story with every chapter until it crescendos and leaves the audience devastated.Doda’s death and Mother’s insistence on not letting her in-laws and many others “betting on her to fail” get their wish is the trigger for the cataclysm that eclipses their joy. Stating this outright because IMO, it’s gives necessary context to the framework of the story and I realized that the synopsis on my copy doesn’t mention it at all. a book dripping with loss, grief, heartache, family, trauma, loneliness, and hope, unigwe delivers a powerhouse of a story. named by a man whose name i refuse to utter, whose name i have expunged from my system and banished to the underworld where it belongs.

The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe | Review - Littafi Books The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe | Review - Littafi Books

Chika Unigwe’s fifth novel, ‘The Middle Daughter’, plies a trajectory of binaries; good and bad, ugliness and beauty, right and wrong, but boundaries are not delineated. I won’t go into too deep of details about how she got out or what actually pushed her to do so, but it was so hard to read about all of the things she faced. The novel focuses on the middle daughter Nani, but is told from the perspective of the other daughter as well so you get a layered look into what is happening with the family.The abuse was so hard to read about, especially when her husband was given the benefit of the doubt and she wasn’t. S. Unigwe stages the drama on a grand scale, alluding to ancient Greek tragedies with the chorus-like voice of Udodi’s ghost, who comments on Nani’s tribulations (“I can do nothing but watch as the unravelling begins, as the flowers that once flourished wither”).

The Middle Daughter Download - OceanofPDF [PDF] [EPUB] The Middle Daughter Download - OceanofPDF

Reading Unigwe’s scathing representation of male power, in its blindness to the humanity of the other, I thought of Francis in Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen. This is a big deal for me because even though this is a retelling, it is also literary fiction and the major thing that endears most readers - myself included - to this genre is its proximity to real life as can be obtained from fiction.Greatest lesson for me is if you do not speak to and into your children’s lives at their most vulnerable, someone else will and will end up using them. At the most vulnerable moment in her life, she is lured into the arms of a sweet-talking preacher named Ephraim. while these issues can happen in the western world yes, we need to acknowledge the fact that they’re more prominent in third world countries, where the lines between crime and punishment are blurred. how privileged are we to not live in fear of falling asleep next to our spouses lest we not wake up in the morning.

The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe - Fantastic Fiction The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe - Fantastic Fiction

South African feminist scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola says in her book Female Fear Factory that fear is how society makes women’s bodies available for men to violate. I think that humans are complex and we all inhabit areas of moral ambiguity,” she tells The Africa Report when she is finally settled. If I hadn’t felt so exasperated by the actions and inactions of all the major living characters in this book, I probably would have better appreciated what the author was trying to do. And then one day you are in someone else’s house wondering whether you will ever see your own three children again.

Unfortunately as heartbreaking and emotionally grueling as Nani’s story turned out to be, I was unable to suspend disbelief enough to feel fully submerged into her reality. It gnaws at her, throws her into the bottomless pit of depression, and, worst of all, makes her vulnerable to people who hunt for brokenness in others to use to their own advantage. She’s trapped because of deep rooted beliefs that if a woman is raped in a man’s house, it’s the fault of the woman for being in that house.