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Funke lives a happy life in Lagos with parents who clearly love each other and a little brother who she bickers with as siblings do, but who she ultimately has a healthy relationship with. She is intelligent and has a promising future ahead of her, but then tragedy strikes and she is sent to live in England with relatives she’s never met, and who disowned her mother for falling in love with a Nigerian man.
Settling in to England is made easier by her cousin Liv, the only person who seems genuinely happy to have her there. She tries to protect Funke (or Kate, as her English family insist on calling her) from the worst of her mother’s bile and tries to help celebrate the good times. She helps Funke to begin thinking of England as home, and in some ways reminds her of her mother who always made the bad times feel better and went all out in celebrating the good times.
Margot, Funke’s aunt, and Dominic, her cousin, are overtly racist and treat Funke as if she is a savage who doesn’t know how to speak or swim. Although Liv is kinder she has absorbed some of the prejudice she has grown up around and it spills out at times. Funke has experienced othering for much of her life, growing up with a white mum in Nigeria she was teased for being mixed race. Later, she will return to Nigeria and have to re-learn the norms and behaviours of the country after spending years assimilating to English culture. There’s a sense that she’s never quite fully of the culture wherever she is in the eyes of those around her.
The writing is lively and engaging and you feel you have a good sense of who the characters are within a few pages of being introduced. The interactions between Funke and her family in the opening sections feel so natural and relatable, you instantly feel in safe hands with May guiding you through the story.
May’s writing really makes you feel for the characters. Funke’s heartbreak and sense of isolation are beautifully written and sensitively handled. Her aunt Margot makes your blood boil in her spitefulness and selfishness. She appears completely without morals and her sense of entitlement is in the extreme. The grandparents have their flaws but you can see a human side to them. They become close to Funke and regret what happened with her mother. Still, Funke is is not treated equally to her cousins. There is always a sense that they are doing her a kindness rather than treating her fully as a member of the family.
Connection to family and familial duty is a central theme in the novel. Funke has many times when she feels abandoned by those she loves yet she doesn’t lose her desire to hear from them, to share her successes with them even after years of cruel silence. She sometimes wishes she were able to forget about them. She searches for connection to her mother when she moves to England, thinking that she will find traces of her there. Instead, she is often left feeling the complete absence. It is heartening to see her find that connection in Lagos where so many were touched by her mother’s commitment to education and her generosity of spirit.
The Stone family is certainly self-interested and will do what they can to protect the family name (and their inheritance). Margot pulls strings to help her children succeed, or at the very least, give the impression of success. Yet she shows very little love to Liv, constantly criticising her weight and personality. Even as an adult, when she has been through some real trauma, conversations between them are difficult, Margot picking an aspect of her life to pull apart every time they speak. She never sees or acknowledges the light in her daughter nor does she offer support when she really needs it. Despite this, Liv has a sense of duty to her family and has moments of having to choose between doing the right thing and doing what will protect the family reputation. We see time and again how such decisions reverberate across decades, generations.
This is a brilliantly written, gripping book that is genuinely difficult to put down. A modern re-telling of Mansfield Park, you don’t need to have read the original to enjoy it (I haven’t and was completely hooked. It was interesting to think about how the scenarios might have played out in the nineteenth century.) There is so much depth to this book it would be a mammoth essay that discussed it all. One of the best books I’ve read this year.
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Thanks for the blog tour support x
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