This Motherless Land by Nikki May
Published by Mariner Books
Publication date: October 29, 2024
Genres: Book Clubs, Fiction, Childhood, Coming-of-age, Cultural
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A loving, happy, Nigerian family is torn apart when a daughter survives a horrific car crash that leaves her mother and brother dead and her father’s grief makes him hate her for surviving. This is This Motherless Land and Funke is the daughter, who at eight finds herself on a plane to England to live with her mother’s white family, people she’s never met and knows almost nothing about.
What awaits Funke is a complete reversal of life as she knew it. She is no longer to be called Funke, but must go by her middle name Katherine. From comfort, sunshine, and familial love she finds herself dropped into an environment that is chilling, including that her aunt Margot despises her. She ensures that for every minute of every day Funke is aware of their charity in taking her in and her Blackness, inferiority, and wrongness. Only her cousin, Olivia is thrilled and cheerfully informs her
“Mummy can be mean—it’s just how she’s made. She’s unhappy and thinks hurting other people will make her feel better. It never does, though.”
Liv herself is often the subject of Margot’s scathing disdain. The two girls bond and become the twin threads in This Motherless Land as the story follows them from childhood into adulthood.
Funke’s trajectory is the ballast in Motherless Land. She’s forced to abandon everything about her Nigerian heritage and adapt to English culture and life. She does so to the extent that she is preparing to go to university when calamitous events force her return to Lagos. All ties with her mother’s family are cut and she is once again an outsider, thrown back into a world she no longer recognizes.
With all of the back-and-forth Motherless teeters on melodrama, but author Nikki May pulls the reader in with the care in which she crafts her characters. Her portrait of Funke is compelling—a child who’s lost everything, but has the resilience to not just survive, but thrive. However, this is a plot driven novel with very little ambiguity. Anyone who appreciates shades of grey over black-and-white will find it problematic. For me, as much as I love nuance in my reading, I’m in a place where a strong dose of actions having consequences is a welcome outcome. Karma for bad people, even if it’s only fiction, is a balm right now.
For more fiction about young girls acclimating to a new environment I recommend The Star Side of Bird Hill.
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