Breakaway Books

Authored by Abi Daré; Published August 2024; Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

And So I Roar made me feel the whole spectrum of emotions. One moment I was laughing, the next crying, the next stirred with inspiration to do something, anything, to change the world. That’s one of the things that makes this a great novel.

In And So I Roar, Adunni has finally managed to escape her small village and win a scholarship to go to school in Lagos. The night before she is due to depart, the chiefs from her village come beating down her door unexpectedly: She must face judgment for the death of another woman from her village. Her advocate Tia refuses to let her return to her village alone, and in spite of Tia’s own troubles with her mother and her husband, she races off in the middle of the night to the village. As the judgment approaches, Adunni and other condemned girls connect and discover that they have all been scapegoated for the drought plaguing their land. Tia, meanwhile, desperately searches for a way to save Adunni. Can she make it in time?

It was difficult to read this novel with anything but anger at the abuse poured upon the women and girls featured in this novel. The girls offered up for judgment in the village are all innocent at best and, at worst, victims of abuse themselves, and yet, because their village suffers from climate change-induced drought, these girls must pay the price. It was difficult to reconcile the existence of this village and its tribal systems with the existence of modern Lagos, just a car ride away. Surprisingly, though, the book was not all grief and anger; Adunni is shockingly funny even in the very worst of circumstances. She takes the extremely unfortunate turn in her luck in stride and is a bright light not just to all of the other characters she meets, but to the reader. She sees the world with a clarity that enables her to dispense true wisdom, understanding the core of the real issues. 

Tia’s story was of a much more morally grey variety. Her relationship with her husband was baffling to me, veering wildly from complete trust and support to contemplation of divorce within one day. But as more and more of the trauma that Tia experienced is revealed, it became easier for me to empathize with her. She is the last in a line of women to have their choices taken away, to be given just one path to follow by their parents or spouses. Even as she discovers more about why her mother treated her quite so badly—neglecting her, lying to her, controlling her—she holds on to her anger, until it becomes clear: She can end this generational chain of poor treatment, and she can forgive her mother. Honestly, it would have been difficult for me to forgive in her shoes, when her mother had taken away the love of her life and her firstborn child. Because so much of Tia’s evolution in this story revolves around her mother, it leaves little room for her relationship with her husband, which, at the end, still left me confused.

There are moments in And So I Roar that took my breath away and filled me with a sense of intense sisterhood. For those moments alone, it is worth a read.