For the first time ever, I tried an e-book. I love physical books, the smell, the way the cover gets teared up as I get more invested, and the act of folding pages to bookmark my favorite paragraphs…it seems to me like a fuller experience. However, on a trip to Arizona last month, my flights were delayed so with nothing else to do I finished the book I was supposed to read over the book in a matter of hours. What was I meant to do! I could not NOT read for the entire week. Additionally, having recently spurlged on thriftbooks.com for a set of books recently, I didn’t want to walk into those stores at the airport and end up buying many more books than I could afford. Therefore, I decided to try Kindle on Amazon Prime. I purchased just a singular book by one of my favorite authors Lesley Lokko and delved right into it. Placing the brightness of my iPad down, and putting on my reading glasses, I cozied up on the plane, in my bed at the hotel, or during my solo date lunch breaks I started the book Soul Sisters by Lesley Lokko.
Set in England and South Africa, focused on particular families over multiple generations, the novel presented the intricacies and difficulties in personal and professional relationships that existed mostly in a post-apartheid environment. And as always mixed with gut-wrenching betrayal.
You could tell the novel was written over a long period of time. It was a bit choppy and didn’t quite flow well together. Skipping years isn’t a stranger to Ms. Lokkos’s writing however the timing and story felt incomplete. There wasn’t as much character depth, the novel felt rushed, and important moments felt skipped over. For example how Jen and Kemi got their relationship back together. For how much importance was stressed about their relationship, I wished there was more offered than “time heals all wounds” for when they reconciled.
The beginning was alright, even though you could sense the quickness in wanting to move on. The ending showed this the most. It was suddenly the end of the book and not in a good way. The novel felt like scene after scene, any proper pause for character reflection and development.
Solam’s storyline felt a bit useless in hindsight. He was introduced as a complex character but then slowly yet suddenly turned into an ambitious hungry prick with no proper explanation or depth into what it meant for him. Additionally, so much time was spent building up this goal he was awaiting to get to (which is a bit too intuitive to the reader) but then when we got to it, it is not given the appropriate importance. Maybe it is set up that way as a metaphor for how, apart from ambition, there’s nothing else to Solam. Which I agree with. He was given too much relevance at the beginning and throughout the book. I understand that he was needed a bit to juxtapose Kemi’s disinterest in politics, given both their parents’ political activism; nonetheless, both he and Kemi were not given proper and reflective reasoning as to why they made the decisions they made.
This novel would have done better and lived up more to its title if it had focused more on the sisters and taken the time to develop their storylines. Even Kemi, she was given much more thought and character description and development at the beginning, but then suddenly in the span of a few pages her husband dies, she has a foundation in South Africa and that’s it. There’s no reconciliation of her feelings about returning to South Africa and having an organization there and contributing to the development of her country and, in her own unique way, carrying on the legacy of her family.
I have been reading Lesly Lokko’s books for well over a decade so I do recognize that knowing her other works, I hold the author at slightly a higher standard and expectation. It is a very engaging novel, but compared to her other works, Soul Sisters was incredibly underwhelming.
In regards to reading on a technological device (Kindle tablet or iPad), it will definitely not substitute physical books in my household but I do recognize their efficacy and plan on utilizing them in case of emergencies.
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