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tania_rj 's review for:
The Wife's Tale
by Aida Edemariam
I received this book as part of my subscription to shelter box book club, which for £10 a month you receive a book that is voted on out of three by the community. Around half of the monthly fee goes to supporting people all over the world who have been displaced by war or famine. The books tend to focus on different people and cultures which is one of the reasons I signed up - to receive books that I probably wouldn’t pick up.
This is definitely a book that I would never have normally read and not the one that I voted for. It’s the story of Yetmegnu as retold by her granddaughter. A child bride, she is married to a man almost
30 years her senior, an up-and-coming priest. It follows her journey as she lives through the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, the birth and loss of her children, an attempted revolution, her husband’s imprisonment and also focuses heavily on her catholic religion.
I really hesitate to criticise an account of someone’s lived experience and there was much to love about the book; the descriptions of food and its importance and the places, plus the history of Ethiopia that I never knew before was really interesting. But it was missing a lot of emotion for me. I don’t know if this was purposeful so that we could draw our own conclusions but after some harrowing events I expected to hear more about how that made our title character feel. It also felt like it jumped in time quite a lot so for example she would have one child and then over the next page should be ready to have her next child which felt a little bit clunky.
Despite this there was something that kept drawing me back to her world and wanting to know how she ended up.
Not entirely sure if I’d recommend it but I’m certainly glad I read it.
This is definitely a book that I would never have normally read and not the one that I voted for. It’s the story of Yetmegnu as retold by her granddaughter. A child bride, she is married to a man almost
30 years her senior, an up-and-coming priest. It follows her journey as she lives through the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, the birth and loss of her children, an attempted revolution, her husband’s imprisonment and also focuses heavily on her catholic religion.
I really hesitate to criticise an account of someone’s lived experience and there was much to love about the book; the descriptions of food and its importance and the places, plus the history of Ethiopia that I never knew before was really interesting. But it was missing a lot of emotion for me. I don’t know if this was purposeful so that we could draw our own conclusions but after some harrowing events I expected to hear more about how that made our title character feel. It also felt like it jumped in time quite a lot so for example she would have one child and then over the next page should be ready to have her next child which felt a little bit clunky.
Despite this there was something that kept drawing me back to her world and wanting to know how she ended up.
Not entirely sure if I’d recommend it but I’m certainly glad I read it.