Ogadinma Or, Everything Will Be Alright – A Book Review

I didn’t know what I was getting into when I first started reading this book. At the end of it, I felt spent, like I had climbed up a hill, against a tide of wind trying to throw me back to the base. The emotions ranged from absolute sadness, frustration, and a tentative hope for the titular character. This book was raw, powerful, and heartbreakingly beautiful. 

The author writes with beautiful prose and her narrative transports the reader to 1980s Nigeria. Through a masterful employ of vivid imagery in her writing, the reader catches glimpses of the sights and sounds of Kano state and Lagos in the time she sets the story.  As an editor, if I were to demonstrate the ‘show and don’t tell’ rule of writing to a budding author, I would point them to this book.

Written in the third person, Ogadinma Or, Everything Will Be Alright, follows the journey of Ogadinma, a painfully naïve 17-year-old. She is perhaps the most frustrating character I’ve read to date. I had to remind myself several times that this is a girl living in a man’s world, in the 80s. Whose worth was defined by the men around her; the one who rapes her, the one who marries her, her father, and a particularly dirty pastor, who made me want to enter the world of the story to beat him up. The book, through the story of Ogadinma, addresses several societal and cultural issues, from child marriage to patriarchy and misogyny, from mental health issues to rape and abuse. 

Ogadinma is frustratingly passive in the book’s first half. She is herded from her father’s house to a man who said he could help her get into university, her uncle. The author paints Ogadinma as a passenger in her own life. Her hopes and dreams are sacrificed at the altar of everyone’s own selfish needs. Even her marriage is a transaction that benefits her aunt and uncle. But as frustrating as her character is, my blood boiled more at everyone who took advantage of her.