giving readers a chance to get to know them, descriptions of the people she meets in Accra tend to be more superficial. And this puts her in conflict with: Eli (who insists he will resolve the situation, just not yet); the Ganyo’s (who sympathise with her situation and want the same end as her – but want her to follow their timing); her mother (who feels this is her one chance both to repay her benefactress Aunty plus to gain her own independence from Uncle Pious and build her own house) and Uncle Pious (who cannot understand why Afi, as part of her family obligations, is not sending him copious gifts and agreeing to house and pay school fees for various cousins).

It has a simple plot, easy to follow writing, a very linear plot and with a cast of characters whose motivations and actions can be debated; and all set against an interesting (if rather unappealing) insight into the Ghanian culture of wealth differences, extended patronage, family obligations and polygamous behaviour. This “other relationship” is one of the central tensions of this story, and it is mostly described through a host of misinformation from Eli’s family, the Ganyos. The only information Afi gets is from Eli's family, who are hostile to the woman and give Afi only disinformation and misinformation about the woman and Eli's relationship to her.I think the problem is that I wish everyone believed that women were also human beings and not just wives or breeding machines. While the author's description of Afi's life back in her home town is full of family members and detailed descriptions of their personalities, their backgrounds, etc. I would have easily read another hundred pages that allowed Afi to learn more of Muna’s side of the story about Eli and the Ganyos, and allowed readers like me to unravel our ingrained assumptions about “the other woman. Afi enters into this marriage with great difficulty - First, Elikem marries Afi with a stand-in and to make matters worse, Elikem is in love with a Liberian woman named Muna. It would have been nice to see how this situation developed maybe months later or even after his mother died, after she became very successful or when she met someone else.

Afi is well aware that Eli has another “woman” and a child who he lives with close by, but she is married to him and there are some expectations for a marriage. Quotidian spaces and seemingly ordinary conversations lead to fraught disagreements and disconcerting realisations. Her mother and herself have existed on the edges of poverty, clinging to the good graces of their extended family and of Aunty, the rich benefactor of the community. I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time.Heavy-bold-italics-underlined on the "𝙨𝙥𝙞𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙪𝙖𝙡 𝙗𝙤𝙣𝙙𝙖𝙜𝙚" because no one loves claiming spiritual warfare more than a man who is fully capable of making decisions. When the matriarch of a very powerful and rich Ghanaian family arranges for Afi to be married to her son Eli, Afi has no choice but to agree. This produces undue pressure for the Ganyo children (Eli, Fred, Richard, and Yaya) as well as financial and emotional abuse for those they deem beneath them.

He sends a stand-in to his own wedding, and only weeks after Afi is married and installed in a plush apartment in the capital city of Accra does she meet her new husband.While Eli and Muna’s relationship is the most obvious source of Afi’s strife, it wasn’t handled well enough to become the most *compelling* tension in this story (more on that later. As Afi grows tired of her circumstances, of being told to be grateful and to sit tight, she begin to crave autonomy and power in her own marriage. The book shows us the journey of efi and her finding and standing up for herself and breaking societal stereotypes. When she does meet Eli she immediately (albeit rather inexplicably for the reader) falls in love with him – but this has the effect of making her unwilling to go along with the pretense of being second choice.

One of the most notorious and bizarre mysteries of the Edwardian age, for readers who loved The Suspicions of Mr. When Afi moves to Accra she realises this will not be a quick process – she is moved into a luxury flat (next door she later finds to Richard’s mistress Evelyn) and everything is put at her disposal (an allowance, a driver, enrolment in a fashionable textile design school) – everything but Eli who is still living with the other woman (Muna) in his house. If people are trying to finish their 2020 reading goals, this is one you won’t be able to put down until you complete it! Medie is Liberian and grew up in Ghana, but then studied at Pittsburgh and is now a senior lecturer in gender and international politics at the University of Bristol, so I wondered to what extent Anglo-American values guided her decisions about this book. The author was great at creating potential opportunities for tension but she often just releases them without exploring further or stoking the flames so there were lots of moments were my expectations for more drama were built and then allowed to fall flat.I think it would have been incredibly helpful for Peace Adzo Medie to peel back the curtain on how these “isms” have impacted the Ganyo’s lives, in the same way she portrays the societal burden placed on Afi’s shoulders. I thought this was going to be a book about a woman overcoming obstacles and taking control of her destiny.