Title: His Only Wife
Author: Peace Adzo Medie
Narrator: Soneela Nankani
Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
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I. Can’t. Stop. Thinking. About. This. Book!!!
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This is perfection, okay?! Peace Adzo Medie did the damn thing with “His Only Wife”, and I’m so glad I read it! Afi is such an amazing character and I will love her forever, okay?! This book starts off with Afi’s wedding to a man that couldn’t even make it to the ceremony, so he has his brother stand in for him. After that, she moves to Accra where he doesn’t even come to see her for a couple of weeks after their wedding, and she has to live in a flat, not in their “matrimonial home”. A bit of backstory about her new husband, Eli. He’s got another woman he’s in love with and they even have a kid together. His family really dislikes the woman and paint a horrible picture of her. They handpicked Afi to marry Eli and free him from the clutches of Muna, the Liberian other woman.
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SO much happens in this book, and I loved every bit of it. There’s a rich cast of characters, and the most interesting relationships evolve between/among these characters. At the beginning of Afi and Eli’s marriage, he hardly sees her, and she’s alone in the flat his family owns. She’s under a lot of pressure from her mother and Eli’s mother, a woman known as Aunty (who also happens to be Afi’s mother’s benefactor) to be the perfect wife and to ‘keep her husband’. It’s so stressful for Afi – tbh I felt her stress so much. There’s also her Uncle Pious, a very shameless and useless old man who did nothing to help Afi when her father died, but came to claim “father” after her marriage to a rich man.
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I love Afi’s growth and evolution, and how she became so much more than everyone thought she’d be. My other favorite character in this book is Evelyn. I thoroughly enjoyed the evolution of Afi and Evelyn’s relationship, and all the things Evelyn embodies. She is living the baby girl lifestyle, and she is living it unapologetically. The Ganyo family is THE WORST. The matriarch, Aunty, is a controlling and manipulative woman who tries to bend everyone to her will. Her daughter is another very annoying person, and her sons are spineless men that live to do their mother’s bidding. Eli, the son that this story also revolves around, is just… I have no words.
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Muna is a character that was shrouded in mystery for most of the book, and I wished we learnt more about her, or got some chapters from her point of view. Can we get a Muna-centric sequel, please?
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I’m just so glad about how this book ended and how the story played out.
Synopsis
Afi Tekple is a young seamstress in Ghana. She is smart; she is pretty; and she has been convinced by her mother to marry a man she does not know. Afi knows who he is, of course—Elikem is a wealthy businessman whose mother has chosen Afi in the hopes that she will distract him from his relationship with a woman his family claims is inappropriate. But Afi is not prepared for the shift her life takes when she is moved from her small hometown of Ho to live in Accra, Ghana’s gleaming capital, a place of wealth and sophistication where she has days of nothing to do but cook meals for a man who may or may not show up to eat them. She has agreed to this marriage in order to give her mother the financial security she desperately needs, and so she must see it through. Or maybe not?
His Only Wife is a witty, smart, and moving debut novel about a brave young woman traversing the minefield of modern life with its taboos and injustices, living in a world of men who want their wives to be beautiful, to be good cooks and mothers, to be women who respect their husbands and grant them forbearance. And in Afi, Peace Medie has created a delightfully spunky and relatable heroine who just may break all the rules.
The Author
Peace Adzo Medie is a Ghanaian writer and senior lecturer in gender and international politics at the University of Bristol in England. Prior to that she was a research fellow at the University of Ghana. She has published several short stories, and her book Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. She is an award-winning scholar and has been awarded several fellowships. She holds a PhD in public and international affairs from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in geography from the University of Ghana. She was born in Liberia.
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