Book Cheer: Lola Shoneyin's The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives
By Dominique Jenkins Jun 29, 2010Our Book Cheer column keeps on keeping on with this impassioned entry from Dominique Jenkins. Librarians seeking a promising first novel need look no further. The first ten readers to email Virginia Stanley get a free ARC.-Heather McCormack
Name: Dominique R. Jenkins Title: Academic Conventions Manager and Library Marketing Association, Penguin Group (USA), and member of the AAP Trade Libraries Committee. Favorite Genres: Mystery, horror (but the kind that makes you think), fiction, memoir, books involving puppies, and romance (but not with heaving bosoms). Lifelong Favorites: My favorite book EVER is Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and my new faves include Beth Hoffman's Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, Kristin Hannah's Winter Garden, and Nora Roberts's The Search. The Winner: I must admit, it was hard to choose among all the great books coming out, but this one grabbed me. How far would you go to keep a secret? What lengths would you go to keep the truth from seeing the light of day, taking with it everything you worked so hard to get? If you are one of the three wives of Baba Segi Alao, the answer is almost anything. In The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, an intriguing and riveting first novel by Lola Shoneyin, the plotting, scheming, and backstabbing is better than anything you have seen on Gossip Girl. Baba Segi, a prosperous-and polygamous-Nigerian villager, does not understand why his new, fourth wife, Bolanle, has not conceived in the two years they have been married. He thinks the fault lies with Bolanle because he has sired seven children by his three other wives: Iya Segi, the first and most crafty; Iya Tope, the second and meekest; and Iya Femi, the third and most glamorous. The wives are not very happy with this usurper-they can barely tolerate one another-so they do everything they can to make her life miserable. When Baba decides to take Bolanle to the hospital to fix "her" problem after his consultations with herbalists and prophets don't work, the three wives realize that the secret they all share will be revealed and bring ruin to their carefully ordered and hard-won lives. However, their plot to rid themselves of Bolanle, and the revelation they try to prevent, come at a cost none of them is prepared to pay. Shoneyin weaves this story together using the first-person narratives of the wives and Baba Segi, each unique and captivating. I must admit my own dark secret: I read the end of books first. Not the whole end, just the last paragraph. So when I read the end of this book, I was eager to start from the beginning to see where I would be led. I was not disappointed, and you won't be, either.
