From the first to the last, Adjei-Brenyah’s ‘Friday Black’ collection of short stories holds rank among some of the most visually-thrilling, inflammatory and enriching ones I’ve ever read. It’s a provoking and daring look at the lives and experiences of black men and women today and every day before, wrapped up in deliciously clever language.
I had SUCH high hopes for this novel. The premise sounded great. The world has ended in nuclear war? YES PLEASE. Survivors are holed up in a hotel, and a body turns up? HELLA POIROT, GIMME. The race is on to find the killer? I’M THERE. The cover and the blurb activated that little part of my brain which said ‘ooooh’ and I’d plonked it in my basket during the final four seconds of waiting in line at Waterstones. A choice I regretted almost immediately after reading the first few chapters.
This book is morbidly comical, with a great writing style that is poetic in its structure (there’s a lot of small chapters reminiscent of poetry collections) and keeps you entertained. In my opinion, it does lose its way towards the end, due to a few random 500 word ‘flashback’ or ‘consideration’ chapters inserts inside of an otherwise well-paced scene. The story becomes a little weaker in the last few chapters and I wasn’t keen on the ending either, though it is obvious where Oyinkan was limited by her characters to create something more satisfying.
tostevinwrites.com 