Oyinda Loves Books

Title: Every Body Looking

Author: Candace Iloh

Narrator: Candace Iloh

Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 

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This was a (very) short book, but still very good and extremely insightful. It’s written in verse – I listened to the audiobook and haven’t seen it in print so I can’t say much about the written flow. The audiobook however read a lot like prose. It follows Ada, a first-gen daughter of a Nigerian immigrant father and an African American mother.

Ada’s life is far from perfect. Her father is strict and religious and doesn’t understand her. Her relationship with her mom, who struggles with addiction, is frayed. Her parents are divorced and she lives with her father. At the start of the book, she hadn’t seen her mom in 2 years, and she lives with her dad.

The story is told in a non linear timeline that shuffles between the present (Ada’s freshman year at an HBCU) and different points in Ada’s part and childhood. There are so many unlikeable characters in this book, and there are topics like addiction, slutshaming, feeling out of place in school, sexual identity, forced outing, and so on. Ada is a closeted lesbian, a dancer, and a girl with many secrets – these play into the story in many ways. Told in first person, we get to feel a lot of Ada’s pain, wants, and needs first hand. She struggled to understand why she was not enough to keep her parents together and why she isn’t deserving of her mother’s love and affection.

This is the first book in the “Ada” series, and I hope other books are longer and we get to know more about Ada and her journey.

Blurb

Every Body Looking is a debut novel in verse in the style of Elizabeth Acevedo and Jason Reynolds. Candice Iloh’s book tells the story of Ada–daughter of an immigrant father and an African American mother–and her struggle to find a place for herself in America and in her own family.

“This is a story about the sometimes toxic and heavy expectations set on the backs of first generation children, the pressures woven into the family dynamic, culturally and socially. About childhood secrets with sharp teeth. And ultimately, about a liberation that taunts every young person.”–New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds

Every Body Looking is a heavily autobiographical novel of a young woman’s struggle to carve a place for herself–for her black female body–in a world of deeply conflicting messages.

Told entirely in verse, Ada’s story encompasses her earliest memories as a child, including her abuse at the hands of a young cousin, her mother’s rejection and descent into addiction, and her father’s attempts to create a home for his American daughter more like the one he knew in Nigeria.

The present-tense of the book is Ada’s first year at Howard University in Washington D.C., where she must finally confront the fundamental conflict between who her family says she should be and what her body tells her she must be. 

The Author

Candice Iloh is a first generation Nigerian-American author and dancer based in Philadelphia, PA.

She has performed her work around the country, most notably at Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City; the Women in Poetry & Hip Hop celebration at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore (where she performed as Nikki Giovanni); and as part of the Africa In Motion performing arts series at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. Competitively, Iloh has advanced to the final rounds of the Graffiti DC Slam, Beltway Poetry Slam, and 11th Hour Poetry Slam.

Her first chapbook, Catalyst (2009), was a Best Book nominee at the 2010 National Underground Spoken Word & Poetry Awards (NUSPA). Her follow-ups, And Become and Break Fast From Her Skin, were published in 2012 and 2014, respectively. Fjords Review, Lambda Literary, Blackberry Magazine, Insight Magazine, The Grio, For Harriet, and Blavity have all published Iloh’s work. Most recently, her work has been featured in The Breakbeats Poets, Volume 2: Black Girl Magic Anthology (Haymarket Books, 2018).