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imanisun 's review for:
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
by Akwaeke Emezi
Quite mixed feelings about this one. At times, I loved it and at times I hated it. The recurring thought I had, though? More Joy! To help parse out my thoughts, I'll separate the good and the not so good.
The good:
- Emezi has a talent for describing people and places. Everything Feyi wears, every scent of the mountain, every room Feyi enters, comes beautifully to life. This is a rare talent that impressed me throughout this novel.
- Emezi will make you think. When I first picked up this book I thought it was going to be really heavy because Feyi was dealing with the death of her husband and trying to allow herself to love again because of that. Then by the end of the first chapter I felt something very different, in that it read far more lighter. But by the middle and the end of the novel, it straddled something both heavy and light and that refusal of genre really made me think. Because, you see, Feyi is also not a simple character. None of the characters are simple. And the plot is not actually simple. And so wherever you end up landing when you finish this book, you will have been quietly thinking in the back of your head (or not so quietly thinking when shit really goes down). Also, in many ways I read this as a meditation on abolition -- we cannot be reduced to the worst thing we have ever done and just because we have done not so great things, does not mean that we should be treated like garbage etc. I think Emezi's ability to do that is remarkable.
The not-so-good (many of these things are related to the good; Janus-head if you will so that's why I'm giving the book the rating I am):
- You know when you're listening to a love song that really gets you going and then you go look up the lyrics and it just doesn't hit the same when you're reading them? Like they're corny or stiff or something? This is the feeling I had with the dialogue. Where the description of people and places thrives, the dialogue does not. I do think that if I listened to this book, rather than read it, I would have had a different experience with it but as I read it, definitely not my favorite.
- So Emezi will make you think. The relationship between Feyi and Alim frustrated me despite the fact that I knew their losses inform their reasons for making the decisions they did. My deepest critique is that at times the book wanted to be a romance novel, which is to say that it is almost wholly fantasy and butterflies. But to me this was not a romance novel. This book was about what I mentioned above, which is that Feyi does not deserve to be treated like shit even though even though even though. I think that Emezi was attempting to cross genres here but I have to say that I did not feel it was as successfully done as it could have been. I'm not sure if there was any other way to tell the story since shit is gonna be messy, especially in a scenario like this, but I guess I wanted more influence from either the romance genre or the "I don't have my shit together" genre.
- Like I said, I wish Joy had been in here more, and by extension, the characters’ queer identities explored more. Joy’s absence from the novel feels quite symbolic. One of my least favorite things in some of the novels I've read recently is dropping in best friend characters who have limited page time. Granted, Joy was *there* in the sense of calling Feyi all of the time. But because Joy was a character with so much potential, it never felt like enough. Towards the middle of this novel, I started wishing that the book was actually about Joy and Feyi's complicated (queer platonic) friendship. But by the end, the Joy we got was rendered nothing more than a walking meme. Quite one dimensional.
- I wish this book was in first person. I really think this would have helped with the dialogue.
The good:
- Emezi has a talent for describing people and places. Everything Feyi wears, every scent of the mountain, every room Feyi enters, comes beautifully to life. This is a rare talent that impressed me throughout this novel.
- Emezi will make you think. When I first picked up this book I thought it was going to be really heavy because Feyi was dealing with the death of her husband and trying to allow herself to love again because of that. Then by the end of the first chapter I felt something very different, in that it read far more lighter. But by the middle and the end of the novel, it straddled something both heavy and light and that refusal of genre really made me think. Because, you see, Feyi is also not a simple character. None of the characters are simple. And the plot is not actually simple. And so wherever you end up landing when you finish this book, you will have been quietly thinking in the back of your head (or not so quietly thinking when shit really goes down). Also, in many ways I read this as a meditation on abolition -- we cannot be reduced to the worst thing we have ever done and just because we have done not so great things, does not mean that we should be treated like garbage etc. I think Emezi's ability to do that is remarkable.
The not-so-good (many of these things are related to the good; Janus-head if you will so that's why I'm giving the book the rating I am):
- You know when you're listening to a love song that really gets you going and then you go look up the lyrics and it just doesn't hit the same when you're reading them? Like they're corny or stiff or something? This is the feeling I had with the dialogue. Where the description of people and places thrives, the dialogue does not. I do think that if I listened to this book, rather than read it, I would have had a different experience with it but as I read it, definitely not my favorite.
- So Emezi will make you think. The relationship between Feyi and Alim frustrated me despite the fact that I knew their losses inform their reasons for making the decisions they did. My deepest critique is that at times the book wanted to be a romance novel, which is to say that it is almost wholly fantasy and butterflies. But to me this was not a romance novel. This book was about what I mentioned above, which is that Feyi does not deserve to be treated like shit even though even though even though. I think that Emezi was attempting to cross genres here but I have to say that I did not feel it was as successfully done as it could have been. I'm not sure if there was any other way to tell the story since shit is gonna be messy, especially in a scenario like this, but I guess I wanted more influence from either the romance genre or the "I don't have my shit together" genre.
- Like I said, I wish Joy had been in here more, and by extension, the characters’ queer identities explored more. Joy’s absence from the novel feels quite symbolic. One of my least favorite things in some of the novels I've read recently is dropping in best friend characters who have limited page time. Granted, Joy was *there* in the sense of calling Feyi all of the time. But because Joy was a character with so much potential, it never felt like enough. Towards the middle of this novel, I started wishing that the book was actually about Joy and Feyi's complicated (queer platonic) friendship. But by the end, the Joy we got was rendered nothing more than a walking meme. Quite one dimensional.
- I wish this book was in first person. I really think this would have helped with the dialogue.