Odafe Atogun

My latest book was a serendipitous find: it's called Wake Me When I'm Gone and it's by Odafe Atogun who lives in Abuja, Nigeria. What I particularly like about his writing is that his characters are people who are open to change.
Wake Me When I'm Gone is the story of Ese, a woman recently widowed who refuses to comply with traditional customs about remarriage and passing custody of her son to her son to a male relative. It is not just that she does not love the Chief who pressures her into submitting to him, it is also that she wants time to grieve the husband that she married for love, and that she is appalled by the treatment of children caught up in this situation. Many of them are treated more like political rivals than innocent children, and there are credible rumours that male children taken into the care of the Chief are murdered.
So Ese stands up for herself, for her son, and for the orphaned children of the village and invokes the opprobrium of the community. She is a very capable woman and is able to support Noah and herself from her own garden, even though she has lost the fields that supplied vegetables for her market stall. But the chief is obdurate, and he makes things very hard for her. As is so often the case in these situations she has to flee, but she finds a safe haven and is able to build a new life. And while there is no soppy happy ending, Ese becomes a leader in her new community and influences important changes to long-standing traditions that have ceased to be appropriate in the modern world.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/08/06/wake-me-when-im-gone-by-odafe-atogun-bookrev...… (more)