a little too spare

Daughters Who Walk This Path by Yejide Kilanko

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: Although both plot and characters are written with very little embellishment, Kilanko is a very effective storyteller.  However, there are some puzzling gaps in her narrative.  She makes sure we know that it is a big deal that Morayo, the main character, must go far from home, to a different state on the other side of the Niger River, for the training for her National Youth Service Corps year.  The distance heightens the element of surprise when she meets Kachi, her teenage beau, at the training site.  After only a few pages, though, Morayo informs Kachi that she has been transformed to serve her year much closer to home.  As a plot device to remind her readers about Morayo's relationship with Kachi, this is all well and good, but as part of an actual narrative it leaves something to be desired.  For the most part, omission of such details doesn't detract from the overall sense of the story, but I found each omission distracting as I had to flip back through the pages to see if I actually had missed something.  Finding that I hadn't, each time I could only wonder why Kilanko chose not to add the very few lines that would have provided the missing details.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.