Second paragraph of third chapter:
Tunde is twenty-one, just out of that period of his life where everything seemed the wrong size, too long or too short, pointing in the wrong direction, unwieldy. Enuma is four years younger but more of a woman than he is a man, demure but not ignorant. Not too shy, either, not in the way she walks or the quick smile that darts across her face when she understands a joke a moment before everyone else. She’s visiting Lagos from Ibadan; she’s the cousin of a friend of a boy Tunde knows from his photojournalism class at college. There’s been a gang of them hanging out together over the summer. Tunde spotted her the first day she arrived; her secret smile and her jokes that he didn’t at first realize were jokes. And the curve of her hip, and the way she fills her T-shirts, yes. It’s been quite a thing to arrange to be alone together with Enuma. Tunde’s nothing if not determined.
I spotted Naomi Alderman when she wrote a particularly good Doctor Who book a few years ago; here she has taken The Handmaid’s Tale and #MeToo and turned them around, to create a world in the very near future where women have developed the ability to strike down their enemies with bolts of electricity. It’s well imagined, with the intersection of new media, religion, politics, and culture well integrated. She lost me a bit with a section in Moldova late in the book which doesn’t really bear much resemblance to the Moldovan landscape in real life. but otherwise I really enjoyed the tight writing and the challenge of a world like ours but with one fundamental change. Worth getting.
This was the last book I read in 2017! Thank you all for following.