The Slave Girl Book

Buchi Emecheta never fails to transport me to another world, a familiar West African world, through her pointed dialogue and scintillating storytelling. Like Chinua Achebe, she has the gift of moving story forward through intentional dialogue, something not too many novels do well. Along I went for the ride, transported by dialect and regional syntax, and I think this is the beauty of most fiction written with an African atmospheric slant - this has unapologetic, cultural nuance. I may have been slightly disappointed by the ending, but one thing that resonated, and kept jabbing my memory, was the true story of a slave girl, in the memoir, Slave: My True Story. This realism in fiction is somewhat of an awakening to the vileness of humanity, but it also gives another look at slavery in its darkest moments: when greed propels one to sell one's own kin; when a post-colonial, warped way of thinking forces one to think that because one was once a slave, others can be too. This book is much different from the exposition in Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, which I loved also, but I'm glad the storytelling was much more enthralling than what I found in Second Class Citizen.