Is this novel actually by Buchi Emecheta? The Joys of Motherhood can swan about with the best of them, beak in the air, and I find it hard to reconcile the author of that with the author of this... this THING. How does this novel offend me? Let us count the ways.

There are countless instances of errors of punctuation and hyphenation. Some sentences are so twisted that they do not make sense. She also sometimes uses one word when she means another. At one point she describes a character as “mystified” when she obviously means “mystical”. Problems of these sorts are so common that over the course of the book they easily match in number those on page one of The Da Vinci Code. It’s that bad. I realise that English was her second language, but reading The Joys of Motherhood you’d never know, and that book predates this one.

The characterisation is thin and inconsistent. The dialogue is shocking. I realise that for the most part it’s in Nigerian English, but I’ve read enough Nigerian novels to know that it is not the dialect that’s causing the problem here.

There’s a general sense of the book being cobbled together without any artistry. What is that intrusion on page 66 about the way the Hausa and Indians speak? It’s right in the middle of a scene. Why is it there? Why is it anywhere in the book? Why the personal attacks on her colleagues at the University of Calabar in the first two chapters? Why the sudden intrusion of the frame story into the flashback on page 22?

The tone throughout is childish. It reads like a draft. Almost like she Dictaphoned it in the car and had someone else type it up. I want to know the story of how it all went so wrong. I want a Police crash investigation team on site and taking measurements.

And it’s just wishful thinking that she wasn’t the author. The feminist themes are in situ, as are the challenging opinions and attitudes. They’ve just been disfigured in the crash. ( )