A family curse, intergenerational living, abandonment, and Yoruba culture create the overarching themes in this story of the Falodun women trying to avoid failed love. Shifting back and forth in time but maintaining its setting in Lagos, Nigeria, the story opens on the day of Monife’s death and Eniiyi’s birth, tying their identities together and forcing Eniiyi to fight for her own destiny untethered to Monife’s or to her Mother’s or her Aunt’s or to either Grandma, all of whom live in the same house, and all of whom feel cursed by heartache and single-ness. 

Much of the novel takes place post 2000, illustrating the juxtaposition between the value of education and the emphasis on marriage and tradition. It seems expected that these Falodun young women become highly educated but also that they find wealthy husbands and unity with the husband’s family, somehow bridging present and past culture seamlessly.

Eniiyi is the most interesting character and the one we’re rooting for as she struggles to create her own path. And the two grandmothers (Grandma East and Grandma West, named for the wing of the house they live in) meddling in everyone’s business can be insightful, funny, and annoying—sometimes all three at once. Monife’s relationship with “Golden Boy,” the weak link in the book, feels predictable, cliche, and cheesy. Eventually I had to skim those sections.

Overall, not a gripping book, but an interesting premise delving into the way families can bog themselves down in belief systems passed down as curses and yet live in a modern world. I think the book would have been more compelling if Braithwaite had offered more depth and complexity of Yoruba culture and patriarchy and history vs modern day rather than so much emphasis on a single family’s curse, which became a repetitive and predictable theme by the end.