A review by sonabanjo
Soul Sisters by Lesley Lokko

2.0

This is one book I am glad I checked out of the library- having recently acquired a shiny new library card. Had I paid the standard £7.99 for it I would have been upset with myself. Unlike Lokko’s earlier work some of which had been my favourites, this was a disappointment.

While the saga was sweeping enough starting in 1921 in Matebeleland in Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe) continuing into the 1940s in Edinburgh and following the stories of soul sisters of the title South African Kemi and Scottish Jen across three decades as we see their paths merge and diverge through experiences as dissimilar as the two characters. While I enjoyed seeing their sisterhood take shape and evolve over the years, with a tenderness unbroken by the worst kind of betrayal, Kemi’s love interest Solam, a young, handsome, well-educated South African who had an Afropolitan background and serious political ambitions in post-apartheid South Africa wasn’t developed at all and his greed-driven callousness made him increasingly unlikeable.

The relationships play out against the background of changing politics and shifting loyalties in post-Apartheid South Africa but Lokko handles one of the most interesting periods of South African history with its aspirations and its conflicts is treated with little depth that it remains merely a backdrop.

While I appreciate the need to move the story along with each section on the book focusing on a time between 1997-2010, the last chapter in each delivering a cataclysmic event but sweeping you away to drop you off a few years later also means we don’t get to see the aftermath of many of these big life events as we catch up with the characters some years later where they moved on from the fallout.

What can I add? Intriguing enough to read at one sitting but out of its depth all the same.