Feyi is a twenty-something-year-old widow. Her husband died one year into their marriage from a car accident. Her inner life is marked with a deep grief that no one around her seems to understand fully. With the encouragement of her best friend Joy, she begins to see other men in her home New York City.
She begins to hang out with a friend Nasir. He is kind, but she has trouble moving from the friend zone into the boyfriend zone. Her heart never falls for him romantically presumably because he doesn’t understand the depths of her loss. But he keeps trying to woo her and brings her to St. Thomas, his youthful home, to show off her art. There, instead of falling for Nasir, she falls for the one man that she is most forbidden to fall for. The remainder of the story contains the outworking of that romantic attachment.
This story brings out many good traits. It confidently brings forth the triumph of true love over all sorts of maladies. Like any good love tale, the details of the romance are unique while the quality is timeless. The vivid writing evoked emotional involvement in me so that I became interested in the plot. I was not familiar with the characters’ cultures described in this book, so Emezi’s portrayal taught as well as entertained me.
However, at the risk of me sounding prudish, physical sexual attraction seemed to play too heavily a role in this book. Further, Emezi relied too heavily on curse words (specifically the f-word) in the text. Those two traits limited the book’s impact on me. Despite these shortcomings, I still was eager to discover the resolution and was surprised at how it came about.
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
By Akwaeke Emezi
Copyright (c) 2022
Simon & Schuster
ISBN13 9781982188702
Page Count: 288
Genre: Fiction
www.amazon.com