From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. From the very beginning of Evan's first novel (winner of Britain's inaugural Orange Award for New Writers), readers know they're in for something rich and strange. Two small furry creatures scurry through the night to their deaths—and are reborn as twins Georgia and Bessi. The middle daughters of Aubrey Hunter and his Nigerian wife, Ida, they occupy the attic room at 26a Waifer Avenue in London. When the twins are eight, the family takes a three-year sojourn in Nigeria, where they live a relatively grander life ("We had servants," Bessi later brags), but where Georgia has a terrifying run-in with a "ju-ju man" that changes her. The novel meanders as the girls grow, pausing to explore an intricate weave of childhood fantasy, African religion, nightmare, pop mythology and the intense inner world of identical twins. All the Hunters are drawn with care: hard-working Ida, who misses her mother so desperately that she converses with her daily in her head; hard-drinking Aubrey, whom liquor transforms into a Mr. Hyde; older sister Bel, rushing into adult sexuality; little Kemy, in love with Michael Jackson; and the twins, with their jokes, adventures and plans for a flapjack empire. This is a funny, haunting, marvelous debut.
(Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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*Starred Review* In a noteworthy first novel that reads with the ease of respiration and recalls both Zadie Smith's
White Teeth (2000) and Monica Ali's
Brick Lane (2003), Evans applies sensitive, lyrical writing to the tug-of-war between dueling identities. Numerous variations on the theme (think geographical, cultural, marital, even biological) occur among the Hunters, a biracial family in suburban London: there's Ida, a Nigerian who fled her village to avoid being married off for "two goats, some money, and an English portable TV"; Aubrey, an alcoholic Englishman; and four daughters whose personalities, like their afro hair, "travel the realms of texture" between soft and supple, coarse and resilient. Of particular prominence are twins Bessie and Georgie, whose blissful "oneness in twoness" in childhood little prepares them for the complication, even terror, of forging individual lives. Georgie, the clingier, more withdrawn twin, slowly descends into insanity, eventually forcing the twins' separation to a violent extreme. Evans' telling wheels in smooth orbits through past and present; suburban London and Lagos, Nigeria; through spot-on domestic dialogue and the giddy, disjointed, internal narratives of mental collapse; through the gritty realities of growing up and supernatural realms that spring from Nigerian tradition. Evans should earn accolades for this trenchant debut, which speaks eloquently about identity, displacement, the most anguished of losses, and bone-deep love.
Jennifer MattsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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