A review by zoe_
The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré

challenging dark emotional hopeful slow-paced

4.0

 This was really good but it also wasn't my cup of tea. By which I mean that I appreciate the story more than I actually liked it. 

I'm always a fan of narrative voices that represent different dialects and, accordingly, I was extremely happy to read Adunni's storytelling. As with any dialect representation, especially one that may be read as a "bad" or "broken" English (a not fully educated English would be a better description but even that is a little lacking), it may be difficult for some to fully immerse themselves in the narrative. However, in my experience talking to other people about such books, it usually takes only a couple of pages for someone to become acquainted with a certain language style and once that has happened, a more “natural” way of representing language often aids in the immersion. 

I, myself, never struggled with the language level at all, yet still remained somewhat non-engrossed. I can’t really pinpoint why that is so, my lack of a deeper emotional connection to the story is the primary reason why I’m not giving this more stars. There’s plenty in the book that should have hit me harder than it did, and plenty instances where I should have been rooting incessantly for Adunni, yet I only ever read with pretty cold interest. Maybe I don’t have a heart, maybe it was bad timing for this book, maybe… 

Anyway, this is a sad book on many levels, even if you (like me) aren’t emotionally impressed by it. It’s also a very hopeful book, which is important because it’s so terrifying in so many ways. The inclusions of the facts also made the story much more vivid because it tore the story extremely close to reality. Daré presents some of the worst and some of the most hopeful of Nigeria. 
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