This is going to be one of those reviews where I talk more about myself than the book, so … brace yourself, I suppose.

I frequently make snap decisions about books. I learn of their existence and thirty seconds later money has left my bank account and a couple of days later I have a book. The problem comes when I don’t read that book immediately, and it gets worse when it sits on my Unread Shelf for four months.

(There are two books on that shelf that have been there longer. Soon. I swear.)

I have no idea why I purchased Oyinkan Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters. No idea if someone recommended it to me, if I came across the author on BlueSky and decided I liked her … nothing. And by the time I got to it, I’d also completely forgotten what the book actually was. See, that cover kinda yells “fantasy” at me? And the book has the same physical format and size as every hardcover YA book I’ve bought for years. And note the “from the author of” at the bottom. Come on! You’re telling me My Sister, the Serial Killer somehow isn’t genre fiction??

Cursed Daughters is not a fantasy novel and it is absolutely not YA. It is, in fact, hated Litratcher.

It’s fucking brilliant.

I keep saying this, over and over: you should read more books by Nigerians, goddammit. The book scene out of Nigeria is amazing right now.

This is the second time this year I’ve had to apply the word “brilliant” to a work of genreless Literary Fiction. I remain salty about it. Because this is the only book I’ve read this year that came close to Tom’s Crossing. I need the swords and lasers and magic contingent to step up their damn game, is what I’m saying.

At the beginning of the book a Nigerian woman intentionally walks into the ocean to die. The same day, her cousin Ebun gives birth to a daughter. The baby resembles the dead woman, Monife, to such a degree that Monife and Ebun’s mothers immediately decide that the baby is Monife reincarnated. Ebun is … unconvinced, and frankly quite a bit upset by the entire thing. There is also the minor matter of a generations-old family curse, that no woman of this family can be happy in love.

It’s still not a fantasy book. There’s some traditional beliefs mixed into a book set in the modern day in Lagos, and there’s a juju woman as a minor side character, but it’s not a fantasy book. Ebun believes none of this nonsense, and her daughter Eniiyi wants nothing to do with it either, but has to live her entire life in her dead semicousin’s shadow. She dreams of Monife occasionally, and by the end of the book genuinely resents the effect on her life that this woman she’s never met has. She remains Monife’s spitting image, so when she occasionally runs into people who knew Monife she either provokes shock or is genuinely thought to be a ghost. And as her great-aunt gets older, she begins regularly mistaking Eniiyi for Monife, and eventually her dementia increases to the point where she forgets Eniiyi exists at all.

The book follows three generations of the family, with Ebun and Monife in the middle, and jumps back and forth from the nineties to modern day. You eventually learn why Monife chose to walk into the water, and I’m not going to spoil anything but God damn does it end well— like, “I gasped and had to put the book down for a minute” well. I started this yesterday afternoon, read a chapter or two and put it down. When I picked it up again in bed last night it cost me at least an hour of sleep, and I got home from work today and sat down in my chair and didn’t get up again until I finished it.

Absolutely phenomenal work. I ordered My Sister, the Serial Killer about ten minutes ago. It’ll be here tomorrow. Oyinkan Braithwaite is on my “buy immediately” list forever now, and I’d really like to know what the circumstances were that brought this book onto my radar. If it was you, thank you very much.