I’m an astonishing seven books into my fifteen-book GoodReads Challenge (yay). Among those seven books I’ve read so far are various fun and compelling stories, from a podcast-based murder mystery to a small collection of Haikus that took me far longer to finish than it should have.
One particular read, however, is still taking up residence in my mind weeks after I finished it and simply refuses to leave. That’s Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty—a provocative romance that might just leave you feeling equal parts satisfied and conflicted.
Not Your Average Romance
I suppose I should preface this by saying I’m not usually a romance reader. It’s simply not a genre that I tend to gravitate towards. And while You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty is classified as a romance, in many cases, it isn’t what one would expect from your average love story. In fact, its “Happily Ever After” did have me thinking “be f*cking for real now” on multiple occasions. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The story follows Feyi, a grieving widow who is finally attempting to dip her toes back into the dating pool. The story takes place in New York (for the first half) and the Caribbean (for the latter half), and Emezi spares no detail when it comes to the vivid descriptions of both places. It makes the story that much more immersive.
Utilizing some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in a while, Emezi paints the picture of a young artist struggling with grief and, eventually, finding connection through that grief in the most unlikely (and controversial) places. As Feyi eventually finds herself pursuing a relationship that is as complicated as it is scandalous, you, the reader, find yourself waiting with bated breath for the other shoe to drop while sometimes allowing yourself to get lost in the moments of forbidden romance just as much as Feyi does. And that’s about as much as I can say without spoiling the plot.
A Book Worth Discussing
Whether you love it or hate it (and the same goes for the characters), You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty is the kind of book that begs to be discussed, and I think that’s why I enjoyed it so much. A book having characters that act selfishly, or make mistakes, or are written with any of the many other flaws that can come with being human does not inherently make a book bad. After all, there’s nothing that says a story’s focal character and their actions have to be likeable for that story to be good.
There is beauty in a piece of work that makes you want to find a fellow reader and dissect it—or blog about it. This book does exactly that.
“Certainly, we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether or not we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.”
-Roxane Gay
You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty is steamy, provocative, beautifully written, and it’s certainly a memorable read. Learn more about it here.
Khaila A. Gentle 