Oct 12

Oct 12 You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty - Akwaeke Emezi

So Feyi had moved down to New York, because if she was a monster, then so was the city, glorious and bright and everlasting, eating up time and hearts and lives as if they were nothing. She wanted to be consumed by the relentless volume of a place so much louder than she was, a place where her past and her pain could drown in the noise. Here, Feyi could keep her name and her unruined face, yet become someone else, someone starting over, someone who wasn’t haunted.

How do you recover from losing the love of your life? How do bring yourself back to the world? In You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, Akwaeke Emezi tries to answer those questions in the best, and messiest, way possible.

Feyi is on the road to recovery. After suffering the loss of her husband in a car accident, she is living in Brooklyn with her best friend, Joy (a brownstone at that), working on her art and satisfying her sexual urges. Whatever it takes to feel whole again. And even though she seems to be living her life as a young, beautiful single woman in NYC, she still has part of herself hidden, afraid to really let go and deal with the pain. It isn’t until she meets Nasir that her life takes a turn for the very best.

I really don’t know how Akwaeke does it. They have written novels in different genres to much success and this one is no different. It is emotional, funny and sexy, with just enough mess to keep my nose in the book. Feyi and Nasir head to the island of his birth for business where Feyi meets Nasir’s very accomplished, and very handsome, father Alim. A celebrity chef and widower, Feyi’s attraction to him feels wrong, but could it be exactly what she needs?

This is why I will never stop reading Akwaeke Emezi (unless they do something egregious) because they continue to write stories that keep me so engaged while pulling so many different emotions out of me. Feyi’s attraction to Alim made me feel uncomfortable and overjoyed at the same time. Uncomfortable because that’s Nasir’s father but also overjoyed because Feyi did not deny her attraction because she’s human. Whether she acted on those feelings, I’ll leave for you to find out when you read the book.

Another reason why I enjoyed this book so much is because of how Emezi writes about grief and what some do to get through it. Too many people treat grief like an inconvenience instead of something we all go through some time in our lives. We’re expected to take three days off from work and then move on when we lose a loved one. Feyi lost her husband five years before the book begins and still had a hole in her soul that needed to be closed up. She did not know how she planned to restore herself, and the universe made her restoration as chaotic as possible. But that didn’t stop her. Feyi dealt with her grief in her own way and I loved it. I love reading stories about Black women just living no matter how messy, emotional or joyous it is. Other women are allowed to have those kind of stories told and so should Black women.

I really cannot wait to read Emezi’s next book. They prove time and time again that they have the talent and imagination to write stories that touch their readers.

Where to buy: The Lit. Bar Loyalty Bookstores Amazon