Blessings: The Best African Coming-of-Age Queer Novel?
A Review of Blessings by Boakye D. Alpha
📖: Blessings
✍️: Chukwuebuka Ibeh
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟⭐ (4.7)
There are 1001 things I can say about this book. Really, I can rumble on for hours😂.
Book Description
Moonlight meets Purple Hibiscus in this gay coming-of-age novel from an astonishing young talent, set in post-military Nigeria and culminating in the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2014. Obiefuna has always been the black sheep of his family-sensitive where his father, Anozie, is pragmatic, a dancer where his brother, Ekene, is a natural athlete. But when an intimate connection blossoms between Obiefuna and a boy from a nearby village, happiness is fleeting once his father catches them together and banishes him to boarding school. Obiefuna finds and hides who he truly is as he navigates his new school's strict hierarchy and unpredictable violence. Back home, his mother Uzoamaka must contend with the absence of her beloved son, her husband's cryptic reasons for sending him away, and the hard truths that they've all been hiding from. As Nigeria teeters on the brink of criminalizing same-sex relationships, Obiefuna's life, or the life he wants to live, becomes even further out of a reach and more dangerous than ever before.
Told from the alternating perspectives of Obiefuna and Uzoamaka, Blessings is an elegant and exquisitely moving story that asks how to live freely in a country that forbids one's truest self, and the love that can flourish in spite of it all.
Review:
Blessings is such a daring debut, ripe for its time. Ibeh’s writing is both beautiful and refreshing, offering vivid descriptions that transport me back to my boarding school days. His portrayal of the setting felt so authentic, it was like reliving the past.
What stands out most is his ability to treat his characters with such humanity—there’s no bias, just a deep understanding of their complexities.
The book doesn’t scream for attention or try to be overly “political”; yet it carries the weight of its themes effortlessly.
It just harbours the dexterity of the issues discussed, the very delicateness of the coming-of-age of a queer boy in a society that isn’t ready for his kind of being. It simply captures the truth about the struggles, the joys, and the heartbreak of being different in a world that demands conformity.
This read made me feel so much. It was sad. It was fun. It was brave. It was insightful. It was hope. It was understanding. It was respectful. It was delicate. It was romantic.
P.S. I read this book months ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to review it until now. Maybe I needed more time to process it, or perhaps I felt that adding words to something so brilliant would somehow do a disservice to the art.
Book of the year from this side. 💪🏿 It is a winner! 🥂🥂
It was a truly beautiful read! Thank you for recommending it to me all those months ago. Maybe I should also give my two cents on what I felt about it.