Book Club Read 3: Love, Marry, Kill
In this book, cheating is abhorrent and it is inevitable.
I was really psyched to read this book. I know a lot of Zukiswa Wanner but had yet to read any of her novels. The cover is gorgeous, and I enjoyed it immensely—despite the little blurbs plastered all over it. I am not a fan of how swooning blurbs often are, melodramatic even. So often they set me up for disappointment, as this one did. You go into it expecting the most life-altering piece of storytelling you ever experienced only for the book to turn out to be just… decent. This happened to me also with the Sally Rooney novels I’ve read, but she does not fall into our core author demographic here, so I will not dwell on those beyond saying…really?
Anyway, I was elated to hear that some publishers are doing away with the ostentatious blurbs. I understand how the book industry came to lean on them for marketing, but I could do without them. It is inconsequential how such-and-such Author I Should Respect describes the book: among the factors that would entice me to buy (cover look, cover feel, page feel, page spacing, font, author, actual story blurb, word-of-mouth recommendation, price, whether or not I want another book more), this is simply not one of them. Just show me good design and a glimpse of a heartfelt love story and I’ll probably buy it, blurb or no.
Now the book. I was a little nervous about this one, from what I could glean from the cover. The guns. The “delicious, dark, and deadly”. The “kill” part of the title. If I enjoyed murder in my stories this would be a Substack about thrillers or mysteries or horrors, you know? Or I’d just read the news. I know dark romance has its fans, that many readers just looooove when characters are falling in love in the midst of gruesome criminal activity. I am not one of them. Give me the cute cliché small-town romance where the highest stakes are someone moving away for a job any day. But sometimes I am brave and I can do hard things, like step a little out of my comfort zone and read something less gentle on a sensitive heart. In some ways I think it was worth it.
This is a love story in defence of cheating. Kind of. I have not read anything like it before, so my mind had a lot to latch on to. The two main characters, Owami and Akani, are married to other people. And they don’t even meet until halfway through the story. The first half is a deep dive into their separate lives: their childhoods, the political contexts in which they grew up, their first losses, their first loves, their marriages, their careers.
I cannot claim to have either loved or hated this, coming in search of a love story only to take the most scenic route possible to find it. But I appreciated it as yet another instance of the most highly marketed contemporary African romance books ensconcing the love story within mountains of political and sociocultural context—as if our romances must justify their existence with “substance”. Plus, I found that the telling of this felt like a telling in real life. By the time Akani and Owami meet, you know them so well it’s like watching an old friend fall in love. You can discuss their compatibility and make commentary about their choices as if you were in a group chat dissecting this new man and whether everyone thinks it’s a good or bad idea based on previous relationships and formative childhood experiences. It was fun in that way. But if you picked this book expecting romance from page one, the structure might feel frustrating.
Perhaps it was necessary to show all the backstory possible in order to get you to a place where you can root for a couple actively cheating on their spouses. At least, this is how it ended up working for me. The story forces you to grapple with the fact that romantic relationships can be complicated, and those complications often compound. To me, it felt deeply realistic. You fall in love with a man who is everything you ever wanted, and you get married in bliss, anticipating the continuation of the greatest love story ever told and aren't you so lucky. But you go on to have careers and children and build a life and then one day you discover he is cheating on you with his first love and you are broken into a new version of yourself. And you resent him. And you resent yourself for going back because that is what a wife and mother does. And then years later, you are the one cheating because you just happened to meet the real love of your life 22 years into your marriage.
This is Owami’s story. And the way the book tells it, what she feels with Akani is unlike anything she has ever felt, not even on her best days with the husband she once adored. And I get it. Not just because her husband cheated on her first but because I understand falling in love to be a thing often defiant of logic and control and everything you know about yourself. Sometimes you walk into love head on straight. Sometimes, the ground vanishes abruptly from underneath you. I can sit here as a reader and say that Owami should have kept her marital vows. She should have given herself time to process the fact that she had not been in love with her husband since his affair and was now in love with someone else. She should have ended her marriage properly and only then started a relationship with Akani. But I know romantic love to be a forceful, magical, spiritual thing. Sometimes, pragmatic, systematic planning just won’t do. You cannot wrestle a wave that has carried you out to sea.
The thing about this book is that it is not about how Owami and Akani fall in love. They are unable to resist each other right away, even their respective marriages and their mutual friend incapable of reintroducing sense into their heads. Instead, the book explores how love changes as we change, how marriage lulls us into the illusion of permanence, that a person can be your person forever. But you cannot own a person no matter how legally conjoined you are. The human heart resists domestication. We belong to ourselves and only ourselves.
Owami loved her husband. And he loved her. Like most couples, they married with the full intention of staying married, of staying happy with each other, of till death do them part. But along the way life changed each of them in subtle and obvious ways. Akani loved his first girlfriend. Then he loved his second girlfriend, who became his wife. But he knew even as he was marrying her and starting a family with her that he did not love the second the way he loved the first. Then he met Owami, and that love eclipsed everything before it. In each instance it is called love, yet we see that it is not the same intensity or even colour of feeling.
What the story seems to be saying is that love is not a singular experience. There are many ways to love or many things you can truthfully call love. But some loves are greater than others, and we don’t get to choose which ones consume us. There are loves you are yet to experience, loves you will not understand until you experience them, loves you might never experience and therefore never understand. Love may arrive in a form more commanding than you have ever known it to be and blow all your best intentions out of the water. It is silly to judge a love you know nothing of.
In this book, cheating is abhorrent and it is inevitable. In this book, human beings are not the creatures of logic they purport to be. They will wreck their lives with their hands as they watch, aware of the wreckage and unable to stop it. In this book, forgiving an unfaithful spouse is expected and it is pointless. The damage cannot be undone but it will be lived with. In this book, maybe we don’t get a say in how or with whom we fall in love.
I liked this story. I did not like how it was written. I was disappointed by the clunky phrases and sentences and paragraphs. Punctuation and syntax did not do their job here. I was frustrated by how bumpy the ride was. The construction undermined what was being said by making it necessary to read bits several times to arrive at meaning. The editorial work allowed the story to be less than what it should have been. Owami’s strong first-person narration was made a lot less enjoyable by the lack of clarity in her speech. Akani’s sections are told in third-person and so end up a lot easier on the mind. I felt like as a reader more was owed to me than this.
Still, the story will stay with me. I valued that even as Owami and Akani’s love was shown to be greater than any other, justifying the destruction it left behind, there were consequences to that destruction. The story ends on a cliffhanger. Their two spouses do not take too kindly to this their great love, and this is where the “kill” part of the title comes in. In the end, their lives are still in danger and their families in wreckage. Nothing is settled, there is no happily ever after—at least not yet. We are left to imagine what more they’ll have to endure to stay together. And maybe that’s the point. The loves that broke on the way to this one were also beautiful and worth fighting for in the beginning: what makes you so sure that this one—the one that has begun in such violence—is the one that won’t break?
The Roses & Wine Book Club meets two Thursday evenings a month in Lavington, Nairobi to discuss romance novels by African writers. If you are interested, please check out this Google Form.