Somewhat Reserved: 2019

My (Well Overdue) Review of With The Fire On High!

4 stars November 07, 2019

Wow... I'm actually back.

Spoiler alert: I have a new laptop now. (Actually had it a couple of months ago).

I went from saying that I'll be gone for a few weeks to a couple of months *gulps* Anyway, at least now I'll be here more frequently and hopefully with more of an explanation but maybe not a whole post because it's lowkey bringing down my mood.

I almost forgot how to upload a review. Ahem, my fault...

Elizabeth Acevedo

Contemporary

Emoni wants to be a chef more than anything, but having a two-year-old daughter, and being seventeen and still at school, isn't exactly making life easy. The one place she can let everything go is in the kitchen, where she has magical hands - whipping up extraordinary food beloved by everyone from her grandmother to her best friend Angelica.

Emoni knows, though, that there are rules she has to play by. And yet, once she gets cooking, her passion to feed will nourish her soul and dreams too. With the fire on high, anything is possible...

Thanks to Reader's First UK for sending me a review copy of this book. My opinion has not been affected by this.

To be honest, I had not heard an awful lot about this book I requested for it. The title caught my attention for sure. It reminded me of something I've heard at church as well as an obvious reference to cooking.

I haven't read about a lot of characters with a similar background to Emoni. She's Afro-latina, lives with her grandmother (or Abuela) and is a teen mum. Early in the novel, it's revealed that she named her baby Emma so that people wouldn't be able to judge her or figure out her background before getting to meet her, since this already happens to Emoni.

She had her baby with this guy named Tyrone (I find it funny how a guy named Tyrone is always a player).

To this day I couldn't tell someone why Tyrone. Maybe because most boys looked past my stick board skinny body, more interested in the bubble butt girls.

Ever since she became pregnant, she faced a lot of troubles in her relationship with him. He basically turned out to be the type of guy that parents warn their daughter's about.

...When your first love breaks your heart, the shards of that can still draw blood for a long, long time.

Apart from her best friend Angelica, she basically mainly kept to herself in school. However a new guy named Malachi came to school and changed this, though she was definitely cold to him at first.

It also didn't help that Malachi assumed that she wasn't fully black because she was 'light skinned' and also because of her curly hair.

"My father is Puerto Rican and he's darker than my mom was, and her whole family is straight-from-the-Carolinas black. And her hair was just as curly as mine. Not all Black women and Latinas look the same."

Reading about Emoni's culinary arts class was pretty interesting. I was pleasantly surprised when Emoni was provided an alternative for a chef's hat.

I stop tucking away the ends of my head scarf. Chef said I could wear this instead of a hat as long as it keeps my hair out of my face and pots. My curls were not fitting under that hat.

And though we have different hair types (she's probably a type 3, rather than a type 4), I wish more was written about her natural hair.

There were moments of conflict, however with her teacher as she would usually tweak things, instead of following the recipe exactly, though her creativity was appreciated.

There was definitely some romance in this book, though it was mainly a hint (some steamy scenes were included, though). I didn't have any major problems with Malachi, he was a little bland but then again this book was not particularly lengthy. It would have been way more interesting if they kept things platonic.

All in all a refreshing read that can be enjoyed by readers and non readers alike.

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My Opinion on Prince of Monkeys!

Book Reviews May 05, 2019

Nnamdi Ehirim

Literary Fiction, Coming-of-Age

Growing up in middle-class Lagos, Nigeria, during the late 1980s and early '90s, Ihechi forms a band of close friends discovering Lagos together as teenagers with differing opinions of everything from film to football, Fela Kuti to spirituality, sex to politics. They remain close knit until tragedy unfolds during an anti government riot.

Exiled from Lagos by his concerned mother, Ihechi moves in with his uncle's family, where he struggles to find himself outside his former circle of friends. He eventually finds success by leveraging his connection with a notorious prostitution linchpin and political heavyweight, earning favour among the ruling elite.

But just as Ihechi is about to make his final ascent into the elite political class, he reunites with his childhood friends and experiences a crisis of conscience that forces him to question his world, his motives, and whom he should become. Nnamdi Ehirim's debut novel, Prince of Monkeys, is a lyrical, mediative observation of Nigerian life, religion, and politics at the end of the twentieth century.

I received an Advance Reader's Copy of this novel from Counterpoint Press in exchange for a review. This did not affect my opinion in any way.

This story reveals events that took place from Ihechi's childhood to adulthood. He had a close group of friends that he played football with, one of them a Pastor's son (thus granting him the nickname Pastor's Son) and the other one an intelligent boy called Mendaus.

He went to a Christian primary school and felt a little different from his peers since his mother practiced Ifá, a traditional Yoruba pagan religion. Especially since his peers were alarmed at it when they saw it portrayed in a film. However Ihechi eventually told them everything. Upon hearing this, Pastor's Son freaked out.

"So your family has been practicing some coded kind of witchcraft since forever? If it's not witchcraft, then what's the difference?"

Eventually his mother made him live with his uncle's family - where he grew close to his cousins Thessalonians and Ephesians (gratefully shortened to Tessy and Effy). Effy was a <christian turned pagan> while Tessy was a <prostitute>.

Mendaus his childhood friend grew up to be a revolutionary figure in the riots and reminded me of Odenigbo, the 'revolutionary lover' in Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. Basically a bold brave man with a lot of hair and a expansive vocabulary.

Ihechi at first was proud of his brave, revolutionary friend at first before deciding to change his mind later on.

"A revolution has to be financed."

"Our revolution is of the mind, not material."

"And that's fine with me, but is your mind bulletproof?"

Though this book was engaging, I couldn't help but get annoyed at some instances where a character would have a piece of dialogue that would take up a page or at least most of it.

I also did not care for the somewhat detailed sex scenes between Ihechi and an older woman, though their sexual relationship revealed how they got closer.

All in all a fascinating story of twentieth century Nigerian life.