"Pulpy, peppery and sinister, served up in a comic deadpan...This scorpion-tailed little thriller leaves a response, and a sting, you will remember."--NEW YORK TIMES "The wittiest and most fun murder party you've ever been invited to."--MARIE ...

The room was mostly positive about Braithwaite's look at two sisters dealing with men and trauma in modern Lagos. What struck us most about the book was how dark it was. Korede is a terrific anti-hero as narrator. We talked a lot about how unreliable she was -- how she saw everyone around her as incompetent, how she did not recognize her own bad behavior in allowing a janitor to take the blame for her actions -- and how appropriate it was that she fails to take the chance to leave her family when she has the chance. What was most interesting about her unreliability was her culpability in her sister Ayooda's attacks. Essentially, the book is about the sister's response to the trauma of their father's physical abuse, and both sisters are basically trying to avoid being hurt by other men in two very different ways: Ayooda by attacking them before they can hurt her, and Korede by only attaching to hopeless or completely safe men (the doctor in her hospital Tade, the guy in the coma, Ayooda's dead lover). Of course, we also noticed that the book did not paint men well either. Despite Tade's kindness and intellect, he fails for Ayooda just for looks, and will not listen to Korede's warnings, reinforcing the idea that men are shallow and untrustworthy. Set in the casual corruption of Lagos, a setting we very much appreciated Braithwaite describing, the book is ultimately about how two sisters have bonded however uncomfortably against a dangerous and unstable world. We didn't see the humor in it that a lot of critics seemed to see, but we definitely thought that Braithwaite did a great if quite direct job of telling a cynical story of women surviving by protecting themselves.