Freshwater

November 27, 2017
Gods torment the young woman they inhabit in Emezi’s enthralling, metaphysical debut novel. Ada has been occupied by a chorus of ogbanje—her “godly parasite with many heads”—since her birth, but it is only after she leaves Nigeria for a college in Virginia that the ogbanje begin to take over. The libidinous Asughara is the most forceful, emerging after a sexual assault has turned Ada into “a gibbering thing in a corner” to become “the weapon over the flesh” that will prevent her from being hurt again. Asughara guides Ada through a tormented love affair with an Irish tennis player that culminates in a marriage doomed by Asughara’s overprotection. Divorced, Ada begins cutting her arm as she did in childhood, feeding the ogbanje with “the sacrifices that were necessary to keep” them quiet. But the bloodletting fails to quell their thirst to “go home”; Asughara is intent instead on freeing her ghastly cohort by manipulating Ada into suicide. Though some readers may find the correlation between mental illness and the ogbanje limiting, others will view this as a poetic and potent depiction of mental illness. Emezi’s talent is undeniable. She brilliantly depicts the conflict raging in the “marble room” of Ada’s psyche, resulting in an impressive debut.

Starred review from December 1, 2017
It is not easy to corral traditional storytelling tropes into untraditional narrative formats without coming across as gimmicky or losing the reader along the way. In her mind-blowing debut, Emezi weaves a traditional Igbo myth that turns the well-worn narrative of mental illness on its head, and in doing so she has ensured a place on the literary-fiction landscape as a writer to watch. Ada, the protagonist, is a young Nigerian who never stood a chance. Right from birth, she has been controlled by evil ogbanje, spirits who mold a difficult child and who eventually create a young woman beset by multiple selves. Narrated by a chorus of the voices battling for control over Ada's mind, the novel brilliantly explores the young woman's slow descent into her own private hell. The first madness was that we were born, that they stuffed a god into a bag of skin, the voices say, hinting ominously at worse things to come. Emezi's brilliance lies not just in her expert handling of the conflicting voices in Ada's head but in delivering an entirely different perspective on just what it means to go slowly mad. Complex and dark, this novel will simultaneously challenge and reward lovers of literary fiction. A must-read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from November 15, 2017

DEBUT Madness is often described in terms of different selves, but Emezi does something absorbingly original with that idea. In her spiritually lush and tough yet lyrical debut, the Nigerian-born winner of the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa grounds these selves in Igbo cosmology, showing that they creep into human beings at birth when the gates between this world and the beyond aren't properly closed. For Ada, growing up disturbed in Nigeria with increasingly at-odds parents, these "godlings" are a torture, pulling her off track and beseeching her to return to their world. When she arrives in America for college, she's a proper young woman soon possessed by Asughara, her "beastself," who hungrily uses her body for wild sex but protects her, too. "We're the buffer between you and madness, we're not the madness," explains Asughara, as the other selves clamor that they just want everything to stop hurting. Ada veers through multiple troubled relationships and a misguided marriage, often arguing with preachy and oblivious Yshwa, source of the world's "christ-induced amnesia," before she recognizes the need to journey into herself and not away. VERDICT A gorgeous, unsettling look into the human psyche, richly conceived yet accessible to all. [See Prepub Alert, 8/21/17.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

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