My Sister, the Serial Killer

I did not love this book. I appreciated its unabashed pulpiness, but the premise is stated in the title and it doesn't develop much beyond that.

What really worked for me is that the story is set in Lagos, and Braithwaite doesn't waste much time explaining details in the setting for a reader like me that is not that familiar with Nigerian culture. Food, clothing, common phrases are incorporated and the onus on the reader is to learn or keep up. I really appreciate that because if Ezra Pound can drop in untranslated Italian, German, French and Sanskrit into poems that high school students are supposed to give a shit about, I think US reading audiences can grow up when it comes to non-European settings. I also loved the grotesquerie of the main character, there's a slow inversion in the plot where we realize that a binary that we've been presented with is maybe not all as it seems, and I thought that was great.

What did not work for me is that the sharpness of the satire of beauty culture and social media culture kind of trails off, and I did not find it as clever as folks who loved it. I also think there wasn't quite enough conflict, either external conflict in plot or in the internal conflict of the main character.

Don't let me turn you off from the book, though. It's a strong first book, and my rating is way more “this was not for me” rather than “this was bad.”