Reviews with content warning for Drug abuse - Butter Honey Pig Bread

What a book! This was such rollercoaster of a tale and definitely in my favourites list. The author managed to twist a corner of my heart with every emotional sub-plot and I am thankful. What a soulful read. So glad I picked it up.

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now_booking's review

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challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

It’s hard for me to rate this because I think it’s a good book and I did like it a lot but I had “buts…”. I thought it was fabulously well-written in terms of the language. Admittedly, this was a “Bookstagram made me do it” pick. I didn’t read the synopsis and yearn to check it out. But so many bookish social media friends had raved about it so I couldn’t be left out. Besides the title had me intrigued and I was promised there would be food.

The premise of this novel is that Kambirinachi, mother of Taiye and Kehinde, is an Ogbanje, who has struggled since birth to stay tethered to the world as a human being. Perhaps it is as a result of this, that her life has been assaulted by tragedy at every turn, her “kin” or other-worldly spirits using the experiences to taunt her back to the spirit world. Because of this, Kambirinachi is a somewhat unavailable mother to Taiye and Kehinde, despite her best intentions, leaving them vulnerable to a devastation that finally tears the family apart. Now for the first time in years the family is gathered again in Lagos and this might be their one chance to discover if healing is possible.

I liked this book and I can tell why so many people love it. The writing and use of language is lovely and evocative, the experiences are realistic and recognizable to the Nigerian experience. The author captured the swallowed pain and silence of a family who has gone through trauma so well and as for the way she writes about food, it’s absolutely delicious and visceral- you smell the smells and taste her words. The story is told by 3 different narrators telling the story interchangeably from both past and future. It’s a testament to the author’s skill that it’s pretty straightforward to keep the story straight. And even more testament to the author’s brilliance how she pieces together the commonality of the protagonists’ experiences around butter, honey, pig or bread. How she jigsaw puzzle fits overlapping experiences at different times to fit into a solid whole without rehashing old tales we already know. In this way, the author crafted a cohesive story that was well put together in spite of all moving parts of different protagonists, different character perspectives , and different timelines.

For me, this wavered between 3 stars and 5 stars. The food for certain, was the 5 stars. Every single time food was on the page, every time the author mentioned a high quality butter, or a high grade lard, or mentioned roasting spices in rich coconut oil, or talked about Nigerian raw honey in such luxurious language, or described the decadance of the pig and the spicy heat of suya or talked about the varieties of bread and the yeasty doughy texture of Nigerian bread! How can anyone not grade this 5 stars for the food alone! The author’s love and admiration for food came out to shine in this book and that was my favourite part of this novel. The author would mire you in trauma and grief and then comfort feed you so your belly would be as full as your heart and the reading less painful for that.

For me, the 3-star rating hovered through large swathes of the middle of the book. This starts off so well and so strongly. The first 20% of the book, I was consumed by the story, entranced by the characters. But then it kind of became very much Taiye’s story, which was fine. I liked Taiye. But I kept wanting more. I wanted more of a balance in the stories. If this was Taiye’s book, that would be fine, but we got just enough of Kehinde and Kambirinachi that I felt like surely, they deserved as much care and intention as Taiye got. I feel like we dwelled A LOT in Taiye’s varied expressions of trauma but only sort of skimmed the surface of Kehinde and to a lesser extent, Kambirinachi. And sure it could just be that Kambirinachi lived so much in her head that there wasn’t much story for her out of it that couldn’t be captured in “her kin was calling her,” and fine, maybe Kehinde, was just a million times more boring and straight-laced than Taiye and had no friends or story to carry more plot with her, maybe that’s why this felt a lot like a book about Taiye’s self-destruction stemming from family trauma, rather than a book about all 3, where I was actively curious about all 3. There’s a point in the novel where Taiye says she’s tired of her own BS and at that point in the novel, perhaps that was intentioned by the author, because I was pretty sick of Taiye as well by then. I mean at that point I had gotten the point of why she was self-destructive, how it manifested and why. And it was a repeatedly destructive cycle that kind of dragged around in the middle portion of the book. And with having 3 protagonists, I don’t think this was a book that needed to drag at all, given how quickly (and somewhat rushed) the ending was. If this was to be a story about healing, for me it needed a little more time on the pages to marinate. More steps, more coverage, more scenes. That part of the story felt a little last gasp to me and I would have liked to see more build towards the resolution, it was kind of a smash-bang, one-and-done sort of drive to the finish that felt kind of inconsistent with the indulgence with which the rest of the story had been told.

This is only the second book I’ve read featuring an Ogbanje woman and the psychological, mental and emotional traumas associated with that existence. In that sense, this is similar to Freshwater (by Akwaeke Emezi) but that’s about where the similarities end. Both books are about Ogbanje but this book deserves its own separate moment because its approach and sensibility and style are pretty different even if the themes are quite similar. This book examines generational trauma, abandonment, child abuse, difficult mother-daughter relationships, sexuality, sexual assault and abuse, homophobia (and indeed internalized homophobia), fatphobia (along with eating disorders), religion, love, trauma, family and loss in the most heartbreaking ways. If there is any trauma you have that could be triggering, tread carefully in approaching this book. It is beautifully written but would be unrelentingly sad if not that the author always pops up with the most delicious food so that your eyes can feast your sorrows away, at least till you have to eat the next wave of pain with the characters.

I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a really meaningful and heartbreaking story of mothers and daughters and spirits, with a Nigerian queer protagonist and lots and lots of yummy food. There are even loose recipes in the prose if that sweetens the pot (it should, they’re worth checking out). Prepare your heart for breakage, but definitely check this out.

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