An interesting thing happened while I was thinking about reviewing this book: I popped over to Goodreads, saw my review, and knocked it down a star. Don’t misunderstand me; that change was from five stars to four, and this is still a book I enjoyed reading and can recommend to people. But if you’re going to read something by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and you should, you ought to start with Cursed Daughters, which I can be much more enthusiastic about.

MStSK begins on the floor in a bathroom, as our main character Korede uses bleach to remove the blood of her sister’s murdered boyfriend. Her sister, Ayoola, is perching on the toilet, blood drying on her body, as she waits for her sister to remove the evidence of her kill. Later, the two of them will dump the body off of a bridge into a lagoon below, hoping the local wildlife gets to it before anyone finds it.

(There are going to be some spoilers, more than I usually have in a review, so be aware of that. The tl;dr of the rest of the review is that I think this book would have been better if it had more room to breathe, and I don’t think it lived up to its own promise. It’s not a bad book, it’s just a distinct step down from Daughters.)

It is, as it turns out, the third boyfriend Ayoola has murdered, and the third Korede has helped her dispose of. Strangely, the police don’t seem to have noticed any sort of pattern, although Braithwaite is quick to emphasize how easily bribed and incompetent Nigerian police are. Ayoola is eventually questioned about this current boyfriend’s disappearance, but the body is never found and she’s never in any serious danger of arrest. And we don’t really get any details about the previous killings.

Here’s the thing: I read this in a couple of big gulps (and it’s short, so you probably will too) and in the moment it was a fun and interesting read. And it’s still a fun and interesting read, but it’s one of those books where a couple of days later the holes are going to start to show. Ayoola is younger and prettier than Korede, and has much better luck with men, and Korede is the more studious and responsible one as well. And eventually Ayoola meets the hot doctor that Korede has a crush on at her job (she’s a nurse; Ayoola is unemployed) and of course he falls for her, and this is supposed to be where the big emotional crux of the novel is, as Korede tries to decide what to do about the whole situation, but it just sort of fizzles. Ayoola temporarily abandons the doctor to fuck off to Dubai with another guy, this one married, and he somehow dies of either food poisoning or a drug overdose while they’re gone, a story Korede immediately doubts, and eventually she tries to stab the doctor but he ends up stabbing her himself in self-defense. Then Ayoola finds another man, and the book ends as Korede comes down the stairs in their home to meet him.

That sounds worse than it is, partially because I’m still in the bad mood I’ve been in all week, but I think the main problem with this book is missed potential. It’s about 220 pages long, and I think it could have used another thirty or so at least, and another hundred pages wouldn’t have been a problem. There’s a lot of backstory spent on Ayoola and Korede’s deceased (and abusive) father, and a side plot about a man in a coma who Korede has been caring for and using as her own private confessional, who wakes up and remembers more of what she told him than she expected. He wakes up and decides he’s in love with Korede, divorces his wife, and sort of hints around that he’s willing to hold what he knows over her head, but it doesn’t end up going anywhere.

So, yeah. Read more Nigerian fiction. Read Braithwaite. Just don’t start with this one.