Freshwater
by Akwaeke Emezi
Note: Overdrive e-book version omits a bunch of non-Latin letters if you don't let it set its own font. I learned this with [b:My Sister, the Serial Killer|38819868|My Sister, the Serial Killer|Oyinkan Braithwaite|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1523366732l/38819868.SY75.jpg|60394238] and then promptly forgot, only remembering after I finished. Goddamnit.
3.5*, rounded up because I'm feeling generous today, but it really could go either way.
In the broad strokes I liked this---both a quick, engaging read and made some really interesting artistic choices. I'm less certain all those choices were successful. The most obvious one is use of foreshadowing: Emezi leans hard on "X had no way of knowing how big a mistake that would turn out to be!" in order to whip up an atmosphere of foreboding, perilousness, and tragedy. It gets noticeably repetitive, and sometimes the promised comeuppance doesn't actually happen (e.g. the story of the python in the bathroom...?). It also weirdly flattens some of the big emotional moments in Ada's life, where you already know a lot about what's going to happen (e.g. the end of Ada's marriage) by the time it actually happens, and then Emezi has to dribble in new details to actually make the pain/despair of the moment felt. (Vague spoilers:
I think one could make an argument for heavy foreshadowing as an intentional stylistic choice, since the story's being told by a chorus of narrators/heavily influenced by oral storytelling and folktales, but... IDK, you know? Bouncing around temporally this way took some of the sting out of the most brutal moments (there are a lot and they are quite explicit, just FYI), and I'm not sure if it was supposed to do that or no.