Imagine This Sade Adeniran

A Flavour of the Book: “He dared me to, which was the wrong thing. My arm went up, then came down and I cut his leg open at the side towards the back. Suddenly everyone went quiet, then I think it was Veronica that started screaming first as the blood started spurting out…”

The Authortrek View: “This is an excellent debut novel from Sade Adeniran, which has just won the Best First Book Award (Africa Region) in the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It’s the story of Lola, who is nine-years-old when the novel opens in 1977. She and her brother, Adebola, are taken away from England to live in their father’s homeland of Nigeria, before the authorities can take the children away from him. The two youngsters have already been abandoned by the mother that Lola never knew, and yet their father does not allow them to stay together as a family in Nigeria – instead, he’s sent them off to live with various relatives, saying that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Although Lola has been to the family village of Idogun before, she’s still disorientated, as she does not know the language, and she has so many relatives. Unfortunately, Lola’s relatives don’t seem to have heard of the saying so dear to their father’s heart, as both children struggle to thrive, with Lola even having difficulty trying to get enough to eat. Going to school should provide her with some respite, but Lola has passed an exam that means that she can bypass the local primary and go straight to the secondary school. Since she’s the youngest pupil there, and small for her age, she suffers from bullying, which is dished out by the teachers as well as the kids… Lola gets resigned to the fact that she won’t get the response she wants from her father from her letters to him. Unfortunately for Lola, her father takes on a new ‘wife’ who can’t stand her, and so she is shunted from one relative to another as she grows up. The only one who really seems nice to her is Uncle N, but there may be a reason why his wife is so hostile to her too… Added to this are the machinations of Nigerian politics, which were very bloody at this time, with various coups. Although Lola does not take much notice of politics, she can’t help but be a gawping bystander as she gets caught up in the strife. Added to this are all the usual woes of growing up, with the raging hormones of the teenage years, and so you have a potent recipe for all the distress that embroils Lola’s life. But even she is taken aback when a friend takes her to task for being so sorry for herself…

Indeed, reading Imagine This can be difficult, as the circumstances of Lola’s life never seem to be short of horrendous, with the beacon of hope shining much less brightly for Lola, than say, even Celie in A Color Purple. Like the latter, Imagine This is an epistolary novel, although Lola chooses to write to the more secular Jupiter in her journals (and therefore never has Celie’s crisis of faith). While the letters in the novel play an important role, it’s usually because they have been ignored, rather than intercepted, as in Alice Walker’s novel. Whatever Sade Adeniran’s inspiration may be, she has done an admirable job of bringing Lola’s world alive, although, like Lola, you may have some difficulty trying to keep track of how some of the main characters are related to her. There is currently a vogue for ‘Misery Lit’ in publishing – real life stories of wretchedness that are so lucrative that they have inspired hoaxes, but Sade Adeniran does not play to this genre, even though Lola’s story is at times completely overwhelming with sorrow. There’s no great sense of redemption either – Sade Adeniran just tells the story as it is, with great verisimilitude. It’s astounding that Sade Adeniran had to self-publish this novel, as it’s not as if she doesn’t have a track record – she has previously had a play commissioned by Radio 4. There are a few minor typographical errors that a professional editor would have picked up, and I did get a bit irritated every time Lola wrote ‘imagine that’ in her journal (which, I’ve read, may possibly be the title of the next novel featuring Lola). However, these are very small quibbles taken in the context of Sade Adeniran’s tremendous achievement – Imagine This is the most professional self-published novel that I’ve ever seen. I can’t stay that I really enjoyed the novel much due to the subject matter, but I do suspect that its power will stay with me for a long time.

You can read a resume of the book on our Amazon store below. To find out more about the editor, please visit our Sade Adeniran page.

If you have any more details about this book or a review you can send it to authortrekreview@authortrek.com. We will not publish your email address, or pass it on to other parties. Please include the author’s name and the book title in the subject line of your email. If you have any further queries, then please read the FAQ first.

Lisez cette page en français avec Babelfish Lesen diese Seite auf Deutsch mit Babelfish

Submit your website to 40 search engines for FREE!