Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi Book Review

Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi Book Review 

Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi  This is a debut novel that i believe came out earlier this year. And i'm going to be completely honest, i didn't know too much about this book 

but i saw like this listed on my library's new releases, sort of, section of their website. And i like to just, you know, browse it for fun - as you do - and this cover just like immediately caught my attention. 

And then david over at the poptimist i think either did an individual review of this book or he talked about this while talking about the giller prize, and i was like, okay, yeah, i definitely need to read this book. 

So this is a story told from three different perspectives. There is kabarinachi who believes that she is this sort of like spirit being. And she believes that she is a spirit that plagues like her family and the people around her with like death and grief. 

So there are a lot of different parts of the story where you see like different members of her family and different loved ones pass away and she believes that it's because of her. But she also believes that like she has like some level of choice and she wants to like live and have a good life. 

The other two perspectives are from her twin daughters. Kahinda and Taiye are basically identical twins. And kahinda has this like really traumatic event that happens to her when she's younger. 

And that like traumatic event basically separates these two sisters from each other. And you see them as adults and kind of how this major event, which is kind of kicked off by the fact that their father passes away, you see sort of how the separation really impacts the two of them and also how it impacts their mother.

So i'll kind of leave it at that. Like this book is very much like a literary fiction book where things happen but there's not necessarily like a plot. 

This is very much a book about like family and trauma and grief and you are basically like exploring the lives of these three characters without any real like straight plot. 

Like things happen in this book, but it's not like i can give you like a plot synopsis necessarily. 

The majority of this book is told like from the perspective of these twin girls as adults but you also kind of do like flashbacks in time and you kind of jump around in the timeline in general and you see like glimpses of their life at different points in time. 

The majority of this book takes place between three different locations: lagos, london, and then a little bit in like montreal and nova scotia.

And so you jump around in time and you jump around in location and you basically see like the lives that these people have built for themselves, the choices that they make, and how those choices have, obviously, impacts on their future and things along those lines. 

So yeah that's really all i can give you in terms of like plot summary. But i wanted to do this book review, one, because this is not a very popular book at all. But two, because i really, really enjoyed it. 

This is one of those books that's going to be like kind of hard to sell, again, because there's not really a plot. But it's like so beautifully written. Like this is a book that you want to luxuriate in while reading.

This book i got a lot of sort of like similar vibes to a book like the vanishing half because it's about like twin sisters who become estranged. But at the same time, like, i know that this is like so completely different from the vanishing half. 

Not so completely different, but this is very much more in the literary fiction side of things versus like the contemporary fiction or commercial fiction side of things. But i could see people reading this and being like, 'oh, nothing's happening, i'm bored . 

If you go into it with that sort of expectation, yes, you'll be disappointed. But that's sort of the incorrect expectation to have. 

This is a book for people who enjoy things going slowly. This is a book for people who really really enjoy character development. The two sisters in here are so like fully fleshed out, especially Taiye. 

I don't know if i'm saying any of these names correctly. So i apologize but i'm just gonna go for it. But she was probably like the most interesting character in my opinion. She's the most complex and the most fleshed out and seeing things from her point of view was always my favorite. 

But this book also does a thing that is really hard for most authors to accomplish and that's like making each perspective extremely distinct and extremely interesting. 

So even though i had a favorite perspective in here, i fell in love with all three of these characters and they're all like fleshed out in their own individual way that they feel like real people and these are real events that could have happened. 

The mother's perspective in here, i will say, is probably like the most different and most disconnected from the other two. 

Just because like the two sisters obviously lived over the same period of time and so you get to see kind of like similar events shown from different points of view and all of this different stuff and so I always find that to be really interesting. And the mother is basically like completely disconnected from that. 

The majority of the mother's sort of story and point of view is about her growing up and her eventually getting married and having these kids and the events that have occurred. 

So it feels very separate from everything else but obviously it's completely also intertwined with everything that's happening with the two sisters. 

But just like the way that it's told, the style that it's told, it feels like the mother is supposed to be the center of the story but i don't think she actually is the true center of the story. At least in my opinion. 

But i think that if you read a book like the vanishing half and you really enjoyed sort of like the dual perspective idea and the idea of like these two sisters who become estranged from each other and that sort of stuff, this would definitely be a really good book to pick up.

The other thing that i really loved in here is there's so much great descriptions of food in here. It will make you extremely hungry uh fore warning for that.

But there's so much good food and food talked about in like such a real way that it will make your mouth water. 

There are even like really simple recipes that are talked about in here. Like not like actual recipes where they like list all the ingredients and then provide you with instructions but like the characters in here cook, 

specifically, one character here goes to culinary school and things along those lines, and so you hear a lot about food and the way that food is used to connect people to each other, connect people to their past, connect people to their family, things along those lines, was really, really beautifully done. 

I also think that even though there isn't really a plot in this book, there are a lot of like sort of reveals that happen because like you are jumping around in like the timeline quite a bit with these perspectives. 

You kind of like hear about a character in one chapter and then you find out like the story behind that character in another chapter. Or you hear about an event in one chapter and then you see later like how things really unfolded or how things unfolded from a different point of view that i thought was like really expertly done. 

This was practically a five star book for me. Like i would say this is closer to a four and a half star book. The only things that really let me down, so to speak, is the fact that like the mother's perspective feels so disconnected from everything else.

And also like the way things ended felt a little bit too neat and tidy for me personally. But overall i thought this was like a really really fantastic book. 

So i think that if you are looking for something that is kind of under the radar a little bit, deals with like family relationships, trauma, grief, things along those lines. 

I really slowed down my reading while going through this book because the language and the atmosphere and everything, like you really want to sit in it. This is not like a readathon book or anything like that. 

You won't speed through this, necessarily, even though it's a really fantastic book. It's a book that like you want to take your time with. And i think the way that it's written, it's specifically supposed to be a slightly slower moving book. But like i loved every second i spent with it 

So yeah, i highly, highly recommend this book. It's another one of those books where i don't think a lot of people have it on their radar and i think that they should have it on their radar. 

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