Unfortunately, when I finished the book, I found myself saying "Is that it?" at the close of the final chapter.
Ms Ayim is many things, she has a list of jobs a mile long in the about the author section. However, a competent writer is not anything that should be added to the list anytime soon.
This book is dull and plodding. There are flashes of good writing at random intervals but, for the most part, this is dull. Dull and meandering, filled with unsympathetic characters, and almost wholly lacking in memorable incident.
Maya is a young Ghanaian girl living in Germany. Apparently her family is minor royalty currently deposed in their home nation. Her mother thinks they should still be treated as full royalty and spends her entire section of the book pulling the old "Don't you know who I am" over all and sundry, whilst maxxing out her husband's credit card. Her cousin Kojo comes to live with them as a brother. I have no idea how old he was supposed to be when he was introduced, but he certainly isn't a convincing portrayal of a child character of any age.
Daddy gets fed up of Mummy's profligate spending, divorces her (I assume - it wasn't entirely clear, but they were definitely separated) and the two children end up in separate boarding schools in England. Then Maya is back in Germany for a chapter where nothing much happens. Then she's back in England at university and she decides to go back to the homeland where her mother is living it up again on an undisclosed source of income and Kojo is now a minor politician who drinks too much and drives too fast. Apparently they have some type of impact on the world around them.
It might be just the fact that I have no sympathy at all for riches to rags charaters who continue to behave as if they're rich. We're expected to sympathise if they can't pay their creditors. I feel more sorry for the creditor who was ripped off for their goods/services by a character who knew they didn't have the wherewithal to pay for it. I couldn't bring myself to give a damn about anyone in this story.
I should have known what was coming early on when there was an entire chapter devoted to Maya having her hair done. That was about as exciting as this story got. The sole exception is one chapter late on, set at an art show, that actually managed to get a point across about western views on African culture. Other than that, there was nothing of note in the entire book.
Spoiler
When the narrator loses two close relatives over two chapters, I would normally expect to be shocked and upset for him/her. When that happened here I just thought oh. This book had perecisely zero emotional impact.
Ms Ayim manages to portray the viewpoint of a young child who doesn't
really know what's going on a bit too successfully. Sadly, this
continues into Maya's adulthood and the reader is asked to do a lot of
work to pull out what's actually going on. For that to work, unfortunately, the reader needs to care.
The prose manages a certain rhythm for most of the book. That works against it because theres so little variation in tone. The narration doen't feel any more mature when Maya is grown up compared to the early chapters when she's still a young child. There are some glaring examples of bad writing in there as well.
A sentence that reads "I took off my pyjamas, showered, got on the number 7 bus to Russell Square..." cannot be excused. She got on the bus straight from the shower? Where was she keeping her change purse?
This sort of thing runs through the whole book. There are big leaps in the narrative from paragraph to paragraph, or even mid-sentence like that example. Although this does mean the book is mercifully shorter, it doesn't add to the readability.
This could have been a fascinating insight into another culture, but the writing completely lets it down.
If you still want to read it, it's available online or in most bookstores.
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