the missing american, kwei quartey
released 2020
read: 16 june 2023 – 22 june 2023
yeah so this is the first genuinely bad book (not just one that i wasn't feeling) i've read in a while. bad like i was trying not to dnf, but i was also picking up this book every chance i got just so i could finally be done with it and not have to read it anymore.
the missing american is 500+ pages of a whole load of nothing. if it had gone through any sort of editing or beta reads this could've been cut down to 200 pages, easy. all you'd need to do is cut out the multitudes of unnecessary, poorly fleshed-out characters, for one. there were so many that i genuinely had to take a moment to reorient myself every time yet another character was introduced, or we circled back to a character and i had to stop and think, "wait, who is this?" (after a point i no longer cared to do the mental jumps required and just rolled with it).
for another, you could cut out some of the convoluted, and ultimately irrelevant storylines. there is a storyline in here with an autistic boy called kojo and the autism centre he goes to and how they're trying to raise funds for it and they're donating ipads... i'm genuinely wondering why it was in there at all. if you cut out that entire storyline, nothing - genuinely nothing - would be lost. or how about if you took away the half-assed romantic storyline between the so-called protagonist emma (who honestly is just a cardboard cut out of a character) and the guy who i don't even remember the name of. or maybe even the sa storyline and its half-assed resolution. please, kwei quartey, you could've taken your pick. i saw someone's review of this book that reads "For the first third of the book you may be wondering what all these seemingly disparate happenings in very short chapters have to do with each other, but everything will be tied up neatly by the end." no, they absolutely will not be neatly tied up.
and while we're focusing on the editing this story clearly needed, how about some attention on the awful stilted dialogue. lack of characterisation is one thing, but unnatural conversations to boot is just too much to bear. someone's father literally dies, and i swear to you it didn't even feel like they were all that upset. wtf.
all this and i'm not even going to mention the misogynistic and ableist undertones (and occasionally overtones) running throughout this novel. or the weird obsession bordering on fetishisation of a white american guy with black ghanaian women. or the reference during an extremely odd sex scene to a woman's "pleasure grotto".
i normally try and find at least one good thing to mention about books i don't like, but i'm genuinely at a loss. i just don't want to think about this book anymore.
rating: ⭐️
