"We're basically reliving history," says Wes Moore
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| The Thread's Must-Read |
“The Girl with the Louding Voice” by Abi Daré
Buy this book
Novelist Jennifer Weiner hit my radar in 2016 when she spoke up about how undervalued so-called women’s fiction is ... particularly by male writers and publishers. Got a minute? It’s worth a Google.
So when the New York Times recently asked Weiner which subjects she wished more authors would write about, I read on with curiosity. And Weiner had a provocative answer: “I’d love more stories about women and money,” she said. “Not women who marry money, but women who have their own money….”
I thought immediately of Abi Daré’s “The Girl with the Louding Voice,” published earlier this year.
Fourteen, bright and fiery, Adunni desires nothing more than to go to school, but when she’s required to help support her impoverished family, she enters a wealthy household in Lagos, Nigeria as a housemaid.
Daré read accounts of the exploitation that maids endure in Nigeria, where many are treated more like indentured servants. And she told the New York Times that a conversation with her mother, when she was still a teen, influenced the book.
Aware that her mother had noticed Daré’s burgeoning interest in boys, her mother told her, “You’re going to get older. Beauty will fade. Everything will fade, but the only thing that will not fade is your intelligence, and what is in your head, your education.”
My Thread Must-Read is a novel you might’ve missed from earlier this year, titled “The Girl with the Louding Voice” by Abi Daré.
Next time? I’m collecting your favorite novels set right here in the Midwest. Classics or contemporary. Share it with me on Twitter.
— Kerri Miller |
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