Cursed Daughters

Loved feeling immersed in modern Nigerian culture. It may be in part thanks to the audio narration (those ladies did a fantastic job), but I thought the setting and dialogue were perfectly done. I enjoyed the relationships between the women in the family.

It was an interesting story for exploring the concept of fate vs. choice, and how the generations can mirror each other. The book involves three different timelines that you alternate through, but everything moves fast and wasn’t hard to follow along with. I felt engaged the whole time.

I don’t have much negative commentary on this one. I just don’t think it will stay with me long. The women made a lot of frustrating decisions (which is kind of part of being plagued by a curse, though, I suppose), and the male characters were pretty two-dimensional (this also may have been intentional, as the women are supposed to be the stars of the narrative). Maybe also I didn’t feel like the characters had grown as much as they should have by the end. Oh, also, I saw this advertised multiple times as some variation of “darkly funny” or even “hilarious” but that Nigerian humor must be very subtle because I did not pick up on much of it. Still a solid read.

Book author: Oyinkan Braithwaite