A review by extemporalli
A Bit of Difference by Sefi Atta

3.0

I'm a bit on the fence about this book - it's clearly trying to be a little bit of an Austen pastiche with more explicit political (as opposed to social, although I guess the distinction can be pretty false) commentary, and that Austen is mentioned fairly often in the prose is a hat-tip at the fact that all the characters are kind of Nigerian Austen-analogues - Wale, the love interest, is a widower of some means with a daughter of fourteen; the mother is a bit of a Mrs Bennet; the young adults are all Rich and Generously Spoilt; the social conventions are tipped as Clearly Ridiculous; and Deola herself is an introverted Emma who's been left on the shelf for a bit too long, like Anne from Persuasion.

And yet. The commentary is far from sparkling, the narration takes too long to unfold. Deola's narration feels a little too heavyweight with the fact that she knows her milieu is too privileged for comfort, something she tries to allay by working for a charity but which, in itself, is privileged (she got the job in the obviously competitive UK charity sector by studying at LSE and working at her father's bank for a little while), leading to lots of self-doubt, etc etc. This doesn't make it unbearably self-indulgent (some other review: "You might think it's self-indulgent, but it's actually great!" which means that it is self-indulgent) by itself, but unbearably plodding. The plot only really picks up in the second half, after her dad's memorial when Deola's hand is forced into action by

Spoiler

the spectre of an unplanned pregnancy

and gets her happy ending after all. I definitely enjoyed the second half of the novel, with all the characters being determined to Do The Right Thing and coming to like each other after all, more than the first half, which did read as a tiny fog of self-pity.