mooi

Mooi geschreven verhaal over een meisje geboren in een jongenslichaam en diens omgeving met vrienden en familie in Nigeria. Interessant ( )

Not exactly what I was expecting. Beautifully sad, but also a little odd ( )

The title character, a young, misunderstood, nonbinary person, dies under mysterious circumstances. Their friends and family in Nigeria (c. 1998) deeply mourn the loss, Older cousin/brother Ostia, who had a complicated relationship with the deceased, is especially bereft.

There’s some beautiful writing here, especially in the first half of this novel, but the resolution of the mystery left me underwhelmed. ( )

“I'm not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn't have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them."

This is a beautiful, moving, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching book. The story is about Vivek - about the life and who Vivek came into contact. It's also about family and love and this misguided belief that parents somehow own or have a say in who their children become. Sure, we try to get some morals and teach right and wrong and how to function in society, but children are people - with their own ideas and thoughts, ones that their parents have no say it.

We have a saying in my house. When my kids want to shave their heads or dye their hair purple, we joke that they "have to ask for approval to cut or color the family hair." It's a joke because of course, it's NOT the family hair and I have zero say in what color it is and what style they want - they are people with their own ideas and minds and I'm just here to help them explore and discover and try to help them find their happy.

I loved Nnemdi's friends and I wish she had gotten more time to fully explore what made her happy. I definitely ugly cried to this one, and I don't regret a single moment. ( )

The book’s tragic premise is given from the beginning (as well as in the book’s title); the reader is aware from the first sentence that the protagonist meets a tragic fate, and so it isn’t really a spoiler to say this, and the story works in temporal circles, shifting back and forth in time, and through the other characters in the story (who knew and loved Vivek) to piece together the events that led to the death of Vivek.

Despite the familiar tragedy that marks almost all queer stories I’ve read, I truly appreciated the focus on community depicted in this novel. The world was and remains a cruel place for queer individuals, suffering being inevitable for a majority, and all of which should be portrayed in literature as works centering queer individuals and lives completely devoid of that suffering would be false, even when created as a reaction against this state of affairs. That being said, community, which is a source of sustenance, is rarely ever depicted in the queer stories I’ve read, which, I think, creates a different kind of falseness in these narratives. It is true that there are individuals who are so secluded and so isolated that they are eventually destroyed, since the goal of queer violence in its different levels and forms, from governments creating and enforcing punitive legislations to societal disowning and ostracization, is death (physical and social death) and erasure. Yet, the miraculous marvel that is community still exists, and the complexity of the dynamics within these communities is hardly ever present, and so it was refreshing to encounter it here. This was a good book: humorous, important, at times too sentimental for my taste, but a good book. ( )