Customer Reviews

Everything Good Will Come

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Sefi Atta's first book is the story of two Nigerian girls and follows them as they grow up. Next door neighbours,in an affluent neighbourhood by the Lagos lagoon,Enitan and Sheri become fast friends.

Yet their growing up is overshadowed by the death of Enitan's brother which drives her mother to a "white-garment" church where the priests perform rituals and speak what sounds to a young Enitan like gibberish. Sheri, growing up in a polygamous home faces her own troubles, negotiating her way through the world, her budding beauty, both blessing and curse.

Sefi Atta deftly and engagingly takes us through the lives of these two girls against a backdrop of political instability, military coups, and male chauvinism in an African society caught between Western and traditional values.

If you enjoy a good story, well told, or are interested in contemporary African writing, or the lives and friendships of
women, then you must get this book

In Everything Good Will Come, Sefi Atta has crafted a beautiful and important novel. We follow the main character, Enitan, as she comes into her own power and joy under the brutal political and social climate in Lagos. This book brims with gorgeous and vivid detail; it reminds the reader how a single voice, claimed and raised, has the power to change the world.

In panoramic colors, Sefi Atta has writen a novel full of life and excitement. Innocent, jaded, happy, sad, amusing, serious, alive and pulsing with the many rhythms of the Lagos that we have grown to love-hate, this story is not just the story of Enitan and the many characters in the novel, it is the story of middle-class Lagosians of every assortment. It is fiction, it is real.

You will experience the odyssey that life in postcolonial Nigeria is for many. However, at the core of the novel is a tone that rings universal. Every reader, regardless of cultural background, will recognize familiar themes that will stir the heart and animate the soul!

The particular edition I read had many typos. I am guessing this was editorial carelessness on the part of the publishers. Thankfully the novel was so good that, overall, such flaws seemed inconsequent.

Excellent!!!

Despite the fact that I gave this book 5 stars, I can not say that I particularly liked it or that I will ever re-read it.

The Pros:

The book is extremely well written by someone who is obviously highly intelligent. Sefi Atta is in complete command of the English language and she owns her style. She is very perceptive, picking up on the delicate things in between. Also the book is littered with original nuggets of invaluable wisdom and quotable quotes. The author sounds like someone I would be honored to meet.

The Cons:

Everything Good Will Come should never have been novel. It would be more honest as either a political treatise of Nigeria or Sefi Atta's autobiography ( Royal College = Queen's College. I bet Sefi Atta attended high school there ). Her style is much too structured and inflexible to have been a novel. I wanted the author to relax a little and dance with her characters. I sometimes felt like I was suffocating while reading because she was doing the same thing she accused some of her characters of doing which was stereotyping and role assignment.
Her characters' lives were not set against the backdrop of the political socio-economy of the times. They served as props in her apparent satire and the environment, rather than her characters dominated the book. If I had a dollar for every time the author says 'in my country', 'in Lagos', 'in Nigeria' or 'in Africa', I could go on a modest shopping spree. I never emotionally connected with any of the characters. Being able to draw emotion from your reader, making them hate or like your characters takes a skill of nuance and Sefi is merely perceptive not nuanced. I was indifferent to all of her characters and that to me was the biggest flaw and surprise.
Furthermore, there were too many unexplored characters and situations crammed into this book who served no purpose at all. The author tries to tackle too many themes and things at once scrambling helter-skelter to cram one big, complex, hegemonic country which she obviously loves into a novel. Therefore, her book ends up all over the place and she never more than superficially analyzes any one situation.
Also the ending was not at all believable. I would not have cared if it was not satisfying. Being unbelievable is the worse literary crime.

So why did I give it 5 stars? For the pros I mentioned above. It is no easy feat to have written such a masterful book but it felt like an intellectual dissertation more than anything else. Therefore I look forward to Ms Atta writing from her heart instead. I'd like to see the novelist rather than the scholar or at least hope for her next book to be somewhere in between.

I wont rehash the book's content since that has been done already, but as I read this book (I just finished it today June 9, 2005), I could relate to it, the travails of the different characters and I identified with the pressure put on them by the expectations of the Nigerian society.

It made me step back a little and think about my similarity to the different characters at their different stages in life up till the closing moments of the book.

The author uses vivid imagery and yet leaves enough for the imagination. I would recommend this to anyone who loves to read about the Nigerian middle class experience.

What I feel sets apart Everything Good Will Come from many other novels based on Africa is Sefi Atta's impeccable descriptive ability that will leave you yearning for more.

It does not matter that you do not know where Nigeria is, or that it's the most populated nation in Africa; by the end of the book, you will feel as you 'know' Lagos.

Ultimately, the author leaves me with my favorite type of painting - The daily hardships many African women face as they try to 'act like women should act', yet at the same time, be active citizens in their country.

A job well done! A Classic!

The book was well written but I found the story to be boring. Not so bad that I did not finish it but not so good that I stayed up late reading.