A review by rachelrazzle
The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

emotional sad slow-paced

• Loveable characters? No

2.0

If it weren’t for the hype surrounding this book I might have given it a higher rating. But honestly I struggled to get through this. I felt it was overwritten and overly long. It felt very flat to me. I struggled to care about any of the characters, except perhaps Kavita. But I also felt the way she was written was fairly simplistic.  I felt no connection to Ossita’s character, who was just pretty unlikeable to me (maybe that was the point?) but because so much of the book is from his perspective it made it hard for me to connect to the book as a whole. Then just as the book is finally approaching a resolution/ revelation there is a whole unnecessary chapter from the perspective of a random person whose character is so one dimensional and whose perspective seems pointless to the narrative. By the time it got to the end I had pretty much lost interest, and thought the revelation at the end was fairly obvious. Overall I felt like the book raised some really important concepts, but didn’t deliver.