Nightbloom

Nightbloom, is a new novel by Peace Adzo Medie, the author of His Only Wife.

The stories centers around Selasi and Akorfa, two cousins in Ghana. Their mothers were close friends, so they became close friends too, creating a special bond among all their other cousins, schoolmates and neighborhood friends.

The first part is told by Akorfa, who retains fond memories of their childhood together, even though she doesn’t really understand Selasi as a teenager or young woman. She and her parents wonder why Selasi won’t make an effort in school and always gets bad grades. It’s a familiar story as a teacher, we often hear about students who have advantages and won’t make use of them. Anyway, Akorfa is caught up in her own studies and goals, and doesn’t really have time to investigate.

Akorfa’s father is able to pull strings to get Selasi into a good secondary school, where the two cousins are schoolmates but not classmates. This seems like it’s about to bring them closer and renew their childhood friendship, but instead it just widens the gap. The two cousins begin on very different paths, and the novel follows both of them.

I’ve read thrillers with this kind of dual-narrative style, and it works here for many of the same reasons. Each side tells a different story, and readers can try to decipher the truth by comparing the two… although not everything is made clear even then.

When we read Selasi’s story, though, she remembers the same events differently. Her focus is naturally on her mother’s death and the way her life changed after that. While Akorfa remembers disappointment when her cousin wasn’t available to visit and spend time together, Selasi’s narrative focuses on an unsettled, unsupervised life in her grandmother’s compound, where her father leaves her when he takes up with his second wife. She remembers her uncle and auntie reluctantly arranging for her private school acceptance but with a lower-tier major than her cousin’s, and her father reluctantly paying for it, and her other relatives promising to visit, but rarely or never actually coming by.

The author doesn’t spend a lot of time describing Ghanian food or customs, which is a style I like in international fiction. I find that it pulls me out of the story to have a character explain what fufu is when everyone in the scene has eaten it loads of times. So there’s a lot to pick up through context. I was very interested in the scenes of daily life, especially discovering the semi-regulated business world, run on Ghanian-style guanxi connections.

Nightbloom has a memoir feel, although it’s fiction, because it focuses childhood memories and family stories. There are unresolved family conflicts, which felt realistic but also frustrating to me. (What really happened with Cecelia? Did she sneak a boyfriend into her auntie’s place or not?!?!?) Overall, this was an intriguing family story with a surprising but not unrealistic ending.