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Book: “The Nigerwife” by Vanessa Walters
Publishing Info: Atria Books, May 2023
Where Did I Get This Book: The library!
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: This twisty and electrifying debut novel about a young woman who goes missing in Lagos, Nigeria, and her estranged auntie who will stop at nothing to find the truth is perfect for fans of My Sister, the Serial Killer and The Last Thing He Told Me.
Nicole Oruwari has the perfect life: a handsome husband, a palatial house in the heart of glittering Lagos, Nigeria, and a glamorous group of friends. She left gloomy London and a dark family past behind for sunny, moneyed Lagos, becoming part of the Nigerwives—a community of foreign women married to wealthy Nigerian men.
But when Nicole disappears without a trace after a boat trip, the cracks in her so-called perfect life start to show. As the investigation turns up nothing but dead ends, her Auntie Claudine decides to take matters into her own hands. Armed with only a cell phone and a plane ticket to Nigeria, she digs into her niece’s life and uncovers a hidden side filled with dark secrets, isolation, and even violence. But the more she discovers about her niece, the more Claudine’s own buried history threatens to come to light.
An inventively told and keenly observant thriller where nothing is as it seems, The Nigerwife is a razor-sharp look at the bonds of family, the echoing consequences of secrets, and whether we can ever truly outrun our past.
Review: “The Nigerwife” by Jessica Walters is a thriller that had been on my list for awhile, but the wait at the library was long. Then when it finally did come in, my stack was so high that I had to send it back and re-request it as there was no way I could get to it. But once it did come back, I was pretty eager to check it out, as the cover and the description definitely made it sound like my kind of thriller, as well as one that had a setting I am not as familiar with. And overall, it was a pretty good reading experience.
There are a lot of things that I really enjoyed about this book. The narrative structure is one of those things, as we follow two perspectives, in two different moments in time. The first of the perspectives is that of Claudine, an English woman who has come to Lagos to search for her missing niece Nicole, who married into a wealthy Nigerian family and seemed to have it all. The other is of Rachel, in the weeks leading up to her disappearance, and seeing what her life was ACTUALLY like behind the veneer of perfection and wealth. Through both of these women we see the social structures, both of England AND Nigeria, and how they, in their own ways, keep women under the thumbs of violent patriarchy and misogyny. The mystery of what happened to Nicole slowly unfolds in her timeline, with a building suspense and dread as she finds herself more and more trapped due to her complicated marriage and some of the choices she makes when trying to push back against it, while in Claudine’s timeline we see just how precarious Nicole’s situation was from the outside. I liked seeing the perspectives of them both and how they had different clues to give the reader.
But unfortunately, after a really interesting dual perspective mystery with slowly peeled back layers and a nice bit of ambiguity along with closure, we had one of those ever-loathed moments where a last final reveal completely derailed my experience of reading this book. I’m not going to spoil anything here, but it’s one of those things that maybe works for some people, but REALLY didn’t work for me, as I didn’t understand what the point of it was. Why did this need to be tacked on in the last two pages? And it also left little explanation as to how we got from point A to point B, and since it was a literal ‘last pages’ twist there was no room to explore and expand upon it. I really hate it when stories do this unless you have REALLY set something up and earned this kind of narrative choice. Unfortunately I didn’t feel like “The Nigerwife did that.
So once again we get a thriller that goes off course due to a strange last moment choice, but up until then I really enjoyed the layers and ruminations of “The Nigerwife”. I will definitely be seeing what other mysteries and thrillers Vanessa Walters brings us in the future.
Rating 7: A complex and layered thriller that has a lot of interesting beats and details, though a strange and abrupt ending left a weird taste in my mouth.
Reader’s Advisory:
“The Nigerwife” is included on the Goodreads list “Good Morning America Book Club List”.
The Library Ladies 