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Akwaeke Emezi

Författare till Freshwater

9+ verk 4,007 medlemmar 146 recensioner 4 favoritmärkta

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Verk av Akwaeke Emezi

Freshwater (2018) 1,106 exemplar
Pet (2019) 1,057 exemplar
The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) 928 exemplar
Bitter (2022) 168 exemplar
Content Warning: Everything (2022) 45 exemplar
Little Rot: A Novel (2024) 6 exemplar

Associerade verk

Granta 158: In the Family (2022) — Bidragsgivare — 26 exemplar

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this ‘romance’ was so disingenuous and hollow. the justification for their relationship being they both are grieving dead partners without any other commonality is not romantic but feels like clutching at straws for justification for their poor and really immoral decisions
 
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highlandcow | 16 andra recensioner | Mar 13, 2024 |
3.75. This novel is reaching for so much and playing with such interesting stuff. It is immersive and vivid and sometimes genuinely cracked open the ontological framework my brain spends most of its time in in really interesting ways. I have some qualms about its success as a novel, as that specific kind of storytelling, that unit of art. To be fair, that is definitely one of the things Emezi deliberately deprioritized--I'm just not sure it's quite for me. I liked this a lot but wanted to like it more, maybe.… (mer)
 
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localgayangel | 48 andra recensioner | Mar 5, 2024 |
I wouldn't say it's a new favorite, but interesting and thoughtful. What it takes to build and maintain a utopia is sometimes scary and harsh---that's given verbal acknowledgement at the beginning of the book, and then shown in practice through the rest.

The writing is a little young for the characters' ages (they're supposed to be what, 16?). On the other hand, part of the story is about the dangers of enforced naivety, so maybe it does fit. The theme of coming into adulthood as a person separate from your parents and making your own decisions is very appropriately teenager, though maybe expressed in the story with more clarity than most teenagers would be able to muster.

Every character had a really different voice---vocabulary, grammar, accent, method of speaking---which, come to think of it, is an interesting artistic choice! I particularly liked Pet's longer bits of dialogue, repetitive and poetic.
… (mer)
 
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caedocyon | 41 andra recensioner | Feb 23, 2024 |
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: The student loans thing really got me. It's a concrete manifestation of the destruction and devastation on everyone in the blast radius that we're otherwise told about more distantly---say, breaking the older brother's heart. The loans are a distant way to put it, too, just more concrete than breaking boys' hearts. ...and around and around I go!)

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.
… (mer)
 
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caedocyon | 48 andra recensioner | Feb 22, 2024 |

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Statistik

Verk
9
Även av
2
Medlemmar
4,007
Popularitet
#6,302
Betyg
4.0
Recensioner
146
ISBN
116
Språk
10
Favoritmärkt
4

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