A review by just_one_more_paige
Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi

dark emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

 
Alright, this is the first book review I have written in 2025 and honestly, I am maybe a little burnt out. This is going on almost 8 years of my blog, next month, and idk...I am behind by multiple books this year already and it feels overwhelming. I love reading, and I love sharing that, and the reviews are helpful for me as I look back, so I don't want to stop. But. I maybe need a reframe. So, I am going to try something. I will keep reviewing, but I am gonna leave the plot recaps out, because those are easily searchable elsewhere. And I'm going to try to be more short-winded. I don't' have to get in allllll my thoughts, just the big ones. And we'll see how that goes.

So, Little Rot. Emezi is a damn literary genius. I have read, and loved/deeply appreciated many of their other works: Pet, The Death of Vivek Oji, Freshwater, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty. So many genres, so much gorgeous storytelling. 

This one is grittyyyyyyyy. This sort of underworld of the powerful and rich in a Nigerian city is graphic: the sex, the money, the drugs, the manipulation/power moves, the murder/violence and the ugly sides of all those things, taking advantage of those with less in terrible ways. And Emezi holds nothing back in their presentation and representation: in showing the horror and calling out the systems and power players within them. They follow our characters as they get sucked in (and how they can't/don't want to get back out again) and how they do their best to wrest power for themselves however they can, twisting a system that takes advantage of them to something they try to use in turn. It's hard to read and hard to look away at the same time. 

The world-building and character development within this context is high quality. There is drama, and the multiple POVs coming together style, and it all unfolds with nuance and a thriller-like pacing/telling. And messy, expansive (and hot) sexualities and relationships are clearly Emezi’s forte - hot damn. It's like it takes some of the messy from Fool of Death and takes it to an unhinged place. And I couldn't put it down for that. But there is also an aspect that goes deeper, exploring shame/humiliation, blurred edges (and total line crossings) of consent, grief, what is and isn't "acceptable (and how that changes based on who is being judged for it), and the many facets of an oft-maligned industry (sex work). And a primary thematic question of: when does the trajectory of your choices become too late to back out of...and what do you do then? Finally, OMG THAT ENDING. It hurts and it’s perfect and it’s dripping in sorrow and hopelessness and inevitability in the besttttt literary way.

What. A. Novel. A mesmerizing noir thriller with such nuanced characters and stories. This is not an easy book, and it holds no answers (and very little hope), but in witnessing these realities, by bringing them to light, it moves the needle in its own way. But seriously, how does Emezi crush EVERY genre?!  



“No one had told her that godless places could feel like this.”

“There are some places that you swear you’ll never go back to because the space itself has become inseparable from the time; the there is the same as the then and you don’t know how to deal with the space if it’s inside a different slot of time.”

“She had made it, made it out, made her life into what she wanted it to look like. Being able to do that, that was power. That was freedom. Justice wasn't something she looked for or believed in, and how useful would it be anyway? People didn't understand that. They wanted revenge; they wanted people to be held accountable in a world where that just didn't happen. It was like expecting a rotten tree to bear edible fruit. It was never going to give you that. It could give you other things, though, if you knew how to work the rot, if you weren't afraid to touch it or use it. The rot could give you power.”

“Blurring the moment of a decision didn’t change the fact that he’d made one…”

“You couldn’t save people; this world was brutal. You did what you could where you could.”

“If he’d learned anything about consent, it was that if you weren’t safe enough to say no, your yes couldn’t count.”

“She said this city changes you so slowly that we don’t notice, little by little. Until it’s too late. And we’re part of everything we always hated.”   
Expand filter menu Content Warnings