Hi friends, happy Wednesday! I hope you’re all having a good week so far. Today I’m going to be posting my review of Francesca Ekwuyasi’s novel Butter Honey Pig Bread.

I read this for my Canada Reads project (reading all the nominated books for #CanadaReads).

Butter Honey Pig Bread by: Francesca Ekwuyasi: When Kehinde is traumatized as a child, her twin, Taiye witnessed it but said nothing and their mother, Kambirinachi, also did nothing. This lead Kehinde to move to Montreal to try and heal, while Taiye ran away to London to numb her guilt. After years of being apart, the twins end up traveling back home to Lagos to visit their mother where they must work through wounds of their past in order to move forward. This was an emotionally heavy novel, but the author did such a good job with keeping it engaging because it was really well written. This novel wasn’t as plot heavy as it was character driven. The plot was good, but without the strong characters there would have been no story to tell. Told in four parts, from three different perspectives, from different times in each of their lives the reader watched as their stories unfolded through the course of the novel. The beginning left the reader with a lot of questions and this big mystery as to why they are getting together after all these years and what happened in their past to cause them to be estranged for so long. For the most part this novel was slow-paced, it picked up near the end, but the pacing worked because it gave the reader time to digest what was happening. Ekwuyasi has such a way with words and writing relationships; the way her characters were so raw with so many emotions and how over time they were able to communicate and slowly work out their trauma. As much as it was intense to read at times, it also left the reader with a sense of relief for these characters; the ending felt hopeful for new beginnings. This novel dived deep into each of the characters and that’s what really made them feel so real and the fact that the reader could connect with them on a level that felt personal. All in all, this was a deeply rooted novel that explored a lot of themes such as family, love, choices and their consequences.