Review by Gift Yusuf of "Purple Hibiscus" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Fifteen-year-old taciturn Kambili is raised by her strict-abusive-Catholic-fanatic father and her overbearingly meek and submissive mother. Her older brother, on the other hand, is the rebel of the family because of his ability to nonchalantly confront their father. 

We are carried on Kambili’s journey of longing and loss as a teenage girl who has a deep love for her father regardless of his inadequacies. However, she finds herself constantly seeking his approval even though, he seems to prefer her disrespectful brother because he is a boy. Later in the book she finds her longing in a man who is much older than she is, when she goes to visit her cousins on holiday. 

The book covers a range of social justice issues and the negative effects of colonial influence which is eye-opening and informative without being too exegetic. It shows that the father is also a victim—a victim of colonialism due to the presence of the Catholic missionaries in eastern Nigeria. He doesn't even realise it in many instances, such as when he makes his family speak only English, banning their native tongue, in the home. 

His religious fanaticism also leads to him isolating his family from other relatives and their native traditions because they are seen as "heathen," while he physically assaults his wife and children under false Biblical justification. 

Regardless of their father's shortcomings, we can tell that he has an unspoken love for his family by some of his subtle actions in the story—for instance, he always shares the first drink of his tea with his children. 

I was gripped from beginning to end while reading this book as it took me on a roller-coaster of emotions, particularly because it ended in such a shocking plot twist. Even with the father’s abusive nature, I found myself feeling pity for him towards the end of the novel as secrets were revealed, and it made me wonder if the mother’s "submissive" nature was disingenuous. 

About the reviewer

Gift Yusuf is a current MA Creative Writing student at the University of Leicester. She’s twenty years-old and graduated from Coventry University where she studied Law and had her first short story published in the Coventry Law journal. In her free time, she volunteers with kids and a Young Writers' organization as an Alpha reader. She also loves to read short stories and watch short films. Her favorite short film is The Neighbors' Window, an Oscar winning film which can be found on YouTube. 

Review by Cathi Rae of "Word Bath" by Kassie Duke

Kassie Duke is an American poet and writer but is firmly linked to Leicester and the University of Leicester, having studied an MA in Creative Writing here. This is her first collection – described as “a short sweet walk through the mind of a writer,” including poems that explore “every mood but melancholy.”

Kassie uses language confidently, painting small but beautiful pictures of nature and the everyday and is particularly skilled at the short poem form – something which is far harder to achieve than might seem from first reading. These poems, often quiet on first reading, bear multiple visits and will re-pay careful attention and time. I enjoyed the micro poems and their use of language based on the natural world. 

In our current dark times, this little message of hope seemed particularly apposite: “and I will dream — not of the time I spent in winter — but of the sun coming up with the steam.”

This is a book to pop into your back pocket and dip in and out of over a coffee or when you have a few moments to reflect on the power of words.

About the reviewer

Cathi Rae is a spoken word artist and poet. Her debut collection is Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems (Soulful Publishing, 2019). She is currently working on an M4C-funded Creative Writing PhD at the University of Leicester on telling marginalised lives through poetry.

You can read a review of Cathi's collection on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

You can read more about Kassie Duke's Word Bath on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "Bystander" Anthology

This anthology has been created by MA Creative Writing students at Nottingham Trent University, and features writing inspired by exploring the perspective of the bystander: the one witnessing the action. This is an interesting premise, in that the reader is often cast as a text’s primary bystander, and so there are parallels drawn here between the many unheard or unregistered voices of society and those actively constructing meaning from often very sparse narrative detail. 

This is certainly an eclectic and diverse set of creative pieces: play-script, poetry and short stories sit happily alongside one another, jostling to be heard. Many of the pieces work best when read aloud, particularly the poetry and play texts, but some of the shorter narratives gain from this approach, too, with the form being used to give a platform to hitherto silent, or silenced characters. Standout pieces are those that turn economy of form to their advantage. A short poem, ‘Party Time’ by Tim Youngs, reflects on the ways in which we are all at the mercy of time itself. In ‘To stop times fall / I hold it steady / my hips don’t swing,’ there is a sense that humans are pre-disposed to oscillate between moments of private contemplation and the intoxicating draw of life itself. In another highlight, ‘Changelessness’ by Jonathan Taylor, a despairing parent tries to make sense of a home that has fallen silent, the children having ‘gone, gone’ and is brilliantly captured in a single page of prose. The hopelessness of being forced to move from active participant in one’s own life to observer of a ruined domestic scene is perfectly captured in the narrator’s ‘half-hearted imitations of real tidiness.’ 

There are other thought-provoking moments in the collection, and the anthology gains much of its power via the process of reading one piece after another, the slow accumulation of ideas and styles, which often takes the reader off in new and exciting directions. It is the mark of good editors that the anthology is sequenced to highlight talent on the MA course, both students and lecturers, as well as a wealth of other guest lecturers and writers. An engaging and thoughtful read.   


About the reviewer
Paul Taylor-McCartney is currently Head of Secondary Teacher Education at Warwick University. He has enjoyed a long and varied teaching career in the discipline of English / Theatre Studies and is following a part-time PhD in Creative Writing with Leicester University. His research interests include dystopian studies, narratology and 20th century literary criticism.