An oddly dull read. The setting is by far the most interesting part―Nigeria as written by a Nigerian author. I found it accessible, which means anyone with more familiarity with the country will probably find it holds their hand too much.

The two leads have fairly complete backstories attached to them, but at no point did I work up more than a mild interest in their lives, even when it involved murder or hardship. It wasn't clear to me why they ended up falling in love, even.

And while I'd like to leave leeway for cultural differences, there are a few things that grated, including slut-shaming (we are, at one point, reassured that a woman who was tricked into prostitution is obviously different from the women who weren't tricked into the profession), and bizarrely, a pervading sense of classism. It's true that it's a cross-class romance between a billionaire heiress and a street hawker, but that's muddied because our street hawker—who I genuinely can't remember ever getting named—was once rich himself. The narrative takes every opportunity to remind us that he's Not Like The Other Poor because of it, particularly harping on how good his English is. In fact, the book rarely lets up, from either character's viewpoint, how terrible and classless all these uneducated folks' English is and that their way of speaking is shameful. 

 

The ending left me with a blank sense of "so what?" We follow these characters around, watch them grow closer and then apart as the hawker discovers Olumide murdered his father, and finally...he doesn't even manage to kill Olumide? Each character gets their individual happy ending, but there's a pervading sense of pointlessness to the leads' whole relationship. There's no sense it changed either of them as a person. Abike would have inherited the way she did regardless. Had the hawker found out the truth about his father's death without ever meeting Abike, his life would have turned out marginally better on account of not pissing off Aunty Precious by scheming. That's it. None of the misunderstandings between them ever get cleared up, they don't end up together, and they never change anything about each other's lives.

The book is ultimately disappointing as both a romance and as a thriller, which is a crying shame when the setup had so much potential.