Hi all! Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Happy Holidays! At this point y’all should just anticipate my end of year content coming literally a year late haha. But if this semester kicked your ass like it did mine I hope you’re at least enjoying your time away, and some of the weather wherever you are. Today, I wanted to talk about this iconic book, You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi because it has been having an interesting time in the book community and I really just wanted to add to some of the noise surrounding it. I had been anticipating this book for a few months now but only recently got my hands on it so I may be a little late to the party, but now that I know what it is that I’ve been missing? Yall, come on now, this book is sooo good. But the chatter is not giving me hope that ya’ll got the message! So I’m gonna break down some of the chatter I’ve been hearing, some of my thoughts, what I liked and didn’t like and why I think this book truly was doing something that no other romance or women’s fiction book (that I‘ve read) seems to be doing. Let’s get into it. The Writing: My Favorite Quotes and LineS So this book follows visual artist Feyi as she’s processing the death of her husband from five years ago. As a result of this, Feyi wants to try to find a way to live and feel alive again and so she starts…dating. (Loosely). She hops between three guys in total, her one true love being her last situationship’s father and along the way finds herself again. I know, it sounds confusing, but stick with me. I describe it like this because, it's sort of how it’s described on the back of the book, but also because I think it sets up a few other things that I’m going to talk about later regarding this book’s intent. But this is the gist of it. So now let’s jump into what I loved about the writing. It was sooo beautiful. It was lyrical, it was intimate and it was profound. Emezi has a beautiful way of discussing food with vibrancy. You can see the colors and smells it as the cuisine seemingly leaps right off the page. Plus, a majority of this book takes place on a fictional Caribbean island which is also described with details of culture that make you feel as if you were there. I also love the way Feyi herself is described. Always vibrant and full of color. Down to the bubblegum pink braids, to the gold braids, to the red dress…ugh. I’m gonna throw in some of my favorite quotes here so ya’ll get what I’m saying. But with that, I feel like Emei really knew Feyi so well that when they described her to us I felt like I knew her well too. Which is of course, what you want from your characters. QUOTES Themes: Grief v HealinG Now, I feel like there was so much confusion around this book because what is it really about? So many responses are telling audiences that this book is about grief and it’s about the romance between Feyi and her love interest, Amir. And while some of that may be true, I feel like there was something deeper in this story that people were overlooking. At the back of the book, Emezi writes that this is the start of Feyi’s healing journey. And the title of the book implies that as well. In the face of grief and loss and sadness, Feyi finds healing and beauty in love, in rediscovering herself, in her art, in her friends and with connecting with such a beautiful island. And I think with those two breadcrumbs before even having read the story, sets readers up for a certain level of expectations. This isn’t going to be your cookie cutter, boy meets girl, and they fall in love sort of story. And this definitely isn’t going to be your CoHo sort of book–where we can expect a moral to be woven into the narrative in a particular way– but having the wrong expectations can set people up to not enjoy this book for sure. Emezi created a really…messy character. (Which I love). Feyi is a homie hopper lol (which we knew from the beginning) and they thrust readers into that action right from the beginning. But I love how the inner monologue we get as Feyi is bumping privates with the first dude, Milan, allows us to see the ways Feyi is using sex as a distraction. Emezi writes: “She needed him not to stop. There were so many things she was keeping at bay” (pp 8). Feyi is struggling to stay connected, but sex makes her feel alive. She wants to feel reconnected to her body, to the power she has over her desire and her femininity when everything else in her life feels like it’s just falling apart. There are so many moments like these where Feyi is simply trying to stay present in her life and her own mind. And that’s when Nasir comes in. He’s supposed to “show her” that she can finally do that with him. Which is all LIES! Because while this is also a romance, this is Feyi’s story. And in the end she comes into her truth and her power not in any way that has anything to do with Nasir (other than him introducing her to his father) but because of her choices, and a little bit of romantic fate. But with that, I think that’s why this book isn’t as much about grief as people were expecting it to be. Nor is it fully about just the romance between Feyi and Amir. And I also think that’s a good thing. This book isn’t as much about grief because Feyi’s story starts five years after her husband, Jonah, had died. We’re not experiencing Feyi deep in the trenches of her tears, we don’t experience (in depth) the loss of her husband in the accident and we don’t mourn with her immensely. We get bits and pieces of both the accident and the moments where Feyi struggles more with Jonah’s death but I think that’s more of a testament to how grief isn’t linear. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, especially wounds as deep as those, and there will always be a little bit of her that grieves. But with that, it also allows this story to have incredible depth, to talk about grief and death and pain without dwelling on it. I think when it comes to Black people, especially Black women in narratives heavily rooted in death, grief, and trauma we can get so used to those stories. We get used to being immersed in those experiences, in that pain, in needing to feel it to believe it. And Emezi talked in a tiktok about how they made this book for Black people. Black people have seen enough stories that focus on trauma and pain and grief of all kinds, so to be able to deeply reflect on that pain with Feyi in some way without having to be devastated by it on our own means a lot. Instead we get to be there for Feyi as she lifts herself up through it. We get to laugh with her through her healing, we get to hold her hand as she grows through her many mistakes, and we get to step back and watch her retake control of her life once she finally feels strong enough to do so on her own. And then we celebrate the love she finds along the way, because more than anything, Black women deserve love, peace and joy. GenreIn another post I talk about how it took some time for people to really know this book was a romance. And once you read it, there’s no question that Emezi really blurs a few lines where that’s considered. However, they’ve created other books in other genres too. Pet is young adult, and Freshwater is an autobiographical fiction, so I think the perspective they bring to this novel and genre is refreshing because of their writing history, but I think the conventions that we typically see in a romance of: “boy meets girl” (person meets person) and we follow that one love interest throughout the entire story really gets skewed here. Of course, romances involve so many different types of relationships that also “bend these rules”: love triangles, polyamory, reverse harem; however, this story doesn’t even introduce readers to the main love interest until 50 percent in. As a result, we have even less time to connect with the new character and love interest, and then try to see Feyi and Amir be together and then root for them to stay together. I can see how this makes it difficult to fall in love with this story as romance because of this, especially if your expectation for a typical romance isn’t met. However, this is why it’s interesting that this book is also categorized as fiction (or women’s fiction). This is probably because of the more prominent themes surrounding Feyi’s healing journey, but also because of the unconventional way this romance story is told. Emezi discusses that the only requirement they understand a romance to need is that it has to have a happily ever after. And while I would argue with that a little bit (there are many romance stories that have “happy for now” endings, especially in the Black indie romance genre), I think other criteria that make a romance a romance are also still there. There’s a love interest and the journey to create and find love is at least half of the purpose of the story. And while I don’t think unconventional ways of storytelling mean that this story can’t categorize it as romance, Emezi also asked if the unconventional ways of this story push it out of the genre altogether. I think it sometimes can. But, since much of this story focuses on Feyi discovering what she wants/needs out of a partner through her other two relationships with these other men, as well as what Feyi wants out of life in general, it still is a romance. This novel blurs the lines of romance and fiction, which made it hard for many avid romance readers to connect with the story as well. But I’ll discuss in some of my critiques why this book can push it more towards the fiction genre because of the relationship development between Feyi and Amir. The Problem With the Industry |
AuthorI'm an 21 year old girl who lives in NY. I love to read and write and fashion is my life. Follow me to find out more! Archives
January 2023
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