Kake
This was OK, I suppose. The writing, plotting, and characterisation were all pretty simplistic, but I wanted a book that wouldn't make my brain work too hard and this certainly fitted the bill.
DNF: The ideas are good, but it's not as well written as I'd like. It feels like the author has everything very clear in his head, but hasn't quite managed to get it all down on paper in a coherent way.
Really interesting exploration of language and culture, with good queer representation. I'm looking forward to reading it again.
This rather peculiar book is ostensibly a biography of the author's father, but reads almost like an implausibly-extended after-dinner speech at an 80th birthday party, or a privately-printed family history pamphlet that accidentally found its way to a wider market. It was clearly written with love, but it's not at all clear who its intended audience is, other than those who knew its subject personally. It seems at times that this audience may have been envisaged to include people outside Igbo society, but explanations aimed at such people are patchy and incomplete; for example, the section in chapter 12 on titles explains that “Agba Nze” means “Nze to be”, but the term “Nze” is left a mystery.
The narrative consists of a succession of vaguely-explained facts, with very little structure or analysis, and there's a lot of listing of names with no indication of who will be important later in the story. There's plenty of irrelevant detail (the maiden names and villages of people who are mentioned once and then never appear again), while details that would have had wider interest (the specifics of the food people were eating, what the protagonists actually thought about Biafran independence, why one attempt at solving a dispute worked when many others had failed, ways of finding a balance between traditional practices and newly-adopted Christianity) are mostly glossed over.
Every so often there are scenes that give glimpses into Igbo culture, but these end up more frustrating than informative, as they quickly move back into repeated praise of the author's father. It's all the more frustrating since the author frequently stresses how important his father considered Igbo culture to be — not just in terms of its preservation, but also examining it in the light of new ideas of equality between all sections of the community.
I've marked this as challenging because of the writing style, not because of the subject matter (which is pretty innocuous aside from a few descriptions of abusive parenting).
I was a bit concerned going into this, since although the first Todd family book, Life After Life, is one of my favourites, I've seen a lot of people stating that there's a twist at the end of A God In Ruins that leaves them feeling annoyed or even angry. For me, though, the ending is what makes this book. Until I got there, it was a perfectly fine book that I might or might not read again — I'm not a huge fan of war stories, which this essentially is — but now I know I'll definitely come back to it.
I don't think the author does herself any favours by saying that this isn't a sequel to Life After Life. (The following is possibly a spoiler? I don't think it really is, but am marking it as one just in case.) If you haven't read Life After Life, then you won't be at all prepared for the way A God In Ruins ends, and I can absolutely see that it would discombobulate you. But having read the first one, it makes perfect sense, and indeed there were clues throughout the story that made me suspect something of the sort was going to happen. If you're planning to read this book, and haven't read Life After Life, stop now and read that first.
DNF: In theory I should really like this book, but I got 20% through and found myself thinking “ugh, am I really only 20% through?” so felt it was probably time to cut my losses. There's not anything about it I really dislike, it's just that it didn't really grab me the way I wanted it to.
The main character was well-handled, as was her trans sister, and it's great to have an autistic protagonist written by an autistic author. But I did feel that the actions of the secondary characters were mainly driven by the plot, rather than by plausible individual motivations. There were attempts at other types of diversity, with Muslim and physically disabled side characters, but these felt rather awkwardly handled, with references to their faith and disabilities shoehorned in rather than thoroughly considered. And the plot felt a bit back-and-forth, rather than a clear arc. Many of the things I didn't love about this book are things I dislike about YA in general, though, so if you're a fan of YA then you'll probably enjoy this more than I did.