I had heard of this book by Bernardine Evaristo, but didn’t know anything about it. When my book club elected to read it, I went ahead and got the audiobook from my library.
It think it’s classified as a novel, but I’m not really sure it fits the definition. I think of a novel as having a single, cohesive story, but then again, people have been playing with the novel as a form for decades, if not centuries, so this book might still qualify. It does not exactly have a single story – it has multiple sections, each of which focuses on a different woman (or person, rather, since one character who was born in a woman’s body does not identify as female).
Each character is either black or mixed race (one has no idea she has black ancestry), each spends at least part of their life in England, and most of them are part of the feminist and/or LGBTQ communities. All the characters are related to each other in some way, but that doesn’t mean there’s an overarching story, just little things (and sometimes not-so-little things) that connect them to each other.
The story starts with Amma, and she might have been my favorite. She’s a lesbian who likes to sleep around and isn’t a fan of commitment. She used to run a small theater company with her best friend until her best friend ran off to America with another woman. At the time the story starts, Amma has just written and directed a play that’s all about black lesbians and she’s about to release it at the National Theater in London and she’s a nervous wreck.
The next section focuses on her daughter, Yazz, then Amma’s best friend, Dominique, so we get to see what happened to her in America. And it goes on from there.
At first I found it kind of frustrating because I kept wanting to go back to Amma and find out what happened to her, and it took me a while to accept the fact that it was not that kind of book and I just had to go with it. I really need to start reading the synopsis before diving into my book club books so I actually know what to expect and I’m not disappointed and/or confused.
That said, this book is gorgeously written and I loved all the characters. I was amazed at how the author could show such contempt for a character, then write another section from the contemptible character’s point of view and they’re suddenly so much more sympathetic because you see things from their perspective and you end up falling in love with them. It’s masterful.
Rather than hire a different actress for each POV character (that would have been a sizable cast), they only had one actress, but she did a great job, especially considering the fact that, over the course of the book, she had to do different British accents, an American accent, a Nigerian accent, and a Caribbean accent.
Opening night of Amma’s play is towards the end of the book and we get to see most of the characters we’ve gotten to know over the course of the book connect or reconnect and hang out, at least near each other, if not with each other. It’s also the only time we get anything at all from a male character’s perspective, even though they don’t get an entire section to themselves.
After that, we get the stories of a couple other characters, then we revisit a previous character as she submits her DNA for testing and realizes, not only that she has African DNA, but that her birth mother is still alive. Their reunion is the last scene of the book and it was perfect.
I loved this book so much and now I have to go reread it since I’ll enjoy it so much more if I know what I’m getting into.