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erinbashir 's review for:
Maame
by Jessica George
emotional
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Overall, I would say that I think this book has value and that it deserves to have existed. But that being said, I'm not sure that I particularly enjoyed it. I think I'm just not the primary audience for these types of stories anymore, or maybe not in the way this story was told.
I don't want to be super harsh because you can tell almost immediately upon starting this book that it's basically a massive self-insert of the author's experiences. I did find the protagonist to be very naive, almost annoyingly so at times. I understand with her story and culture and responsibilities at a young age that she didn't get the chance to have a lot of coming-of-age experiences early in life, thus leading to them all being delayed until now, but I feel like even if you don't have those experiences you still know something about the way the world works. But this is also just my tastes personally, because I think I've kinda grown tired of reading stories where the characters are super naive and innocent.
This book felt moreso like an alternate version of a journal than a novel. It felt very stream-of-consciousness in a way, because it touches on a lot of different subjects relating to the protagonist's life when they happen, but doesn't really go into depth about any one thing enough to truly say something about it. I think this novel would've been a lot stronger if it chose one or two themes and really dug into them rather than letting the themes arise through plot and just kinda describing events as they happened. I found a lot of characters voices to sound very similar and a lot of the depth of the characters and situations were told to us, not necessarily shown.
Overall this was very heartfelt, for sure. Although imperfect, I think stories like these are super important to have and there are probably many young Ghanaian women out there who saw themselves reflected in literature for the first time; that is one thing this book does perfectly.
I don't want to be super harsh because you can tell almost immediately upon starting this book that it's basically a massive self-insert of the author's experiences. I did find the protagonist to be very naive, almost annoyingly so at times. I understand with her story and culture and responsibilities at a young age that she didn't get the chance to have a lot of coming-of-age experiences early in life, thus leading to them all being delayed until now, but I feel like even if you don't have those experiences you still know something about the way the world works. But this is also just my tastes personally, because I think I've kinda grown tired of reading stories where the characters are super naive and innocent.
This book felt moreso like an alternate version of a journal than a novel. It felt very stream-of-consciousness in a way, because it touches on a lot of different subjects relating to the protagonist's life when they happen, but doesn't really go into depth about any one thing enough to truly say something about it. I think this novel would've been a lot stronger if it chose one or two themes and really dug into them rather than letting the themes arise through plot and just kinda describing events as they happened. I found a lot of characters voices to sound very similar and a lot of the depth of the characters and situations were told to us, not necessarily shown.
Overall this was very heartfelt, for sure. Although imperfect, I think stories like these are super important to have and there are probably many young Ghanaian women out there who saw themselves reflected in literature for the first time; that is one thing this book does perfectly.