"Stay with me" by Ayòbámi Adébàyò. The weight of loss.

Rotimi, stay with me. It's the plea of a mother who has lost too much. The novel describes the life of a couple, Yejide and Akin, who struggle to have children, and then struggle to keep them alive. The variety of topics (family expectations and social pressure, guilt, impotence, deceit, loss, death, hope, and death again) and the way Adébayò has been able to explain so much grief without blaming anyone in particular but all of them at the same time make reading it a unique experience. On the verge of crying for most of the novel and actually crying at some points, I was able to be Yejide -longing for what seems to be impossible- and love like Akin -wanting to be unrealistically flawless for the world, and for the one I love. I could feel my hope vanishing, and then raising again. I was in the 80s, then I was in the present. I wanted to help them, to show them an exit they do not see, to make them sit down and talk about the things they are afraid to say aloud. I wanted to save them.

It would be foolish to go into too much detail, for this novel's soul recquires the things that take place to be unexpected, so I can only say it made me a mother without being one and it made me feel in so many ways I cannot describe. Moreover, I was surprised to see a narrative dealing with a man being impotent, instead of the typical "barren woman", which made it even more interesting. It has been a great discovery and I simply fell in love with it!

Rating: 10/10

PS: The cover is almost the same as Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. The only thing I did not like.