Why read Adanna when you can just attend every single funeral in your village back-to-back? I’m sure that’ll hurt less.
I finished this book feeling completely sapped of life, as if I’ve been mourning for days instead of simply reading. It was Murphy’s Law in book form. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and then got worse. At some point I had to pause and wonder how a writer reaches this depth of emotional precision because this level of pain can’t all be fiction. Some parts felt too real and too raw, like she was writing with an open wound. This book broke my heart, not in a “my four year old relationship just ended” way. It shattered it, swept up the pieces, and scattered them in the harmattan wind.
Adanna’s story is relentless. Just when you think she’s caught a break, when you see a glimmer of hope on the horizon, life comes back with a running start and knocks her flat again. It’s not even the big, dramatic tragedies that destroy you, though there are plenty of those. It’s the small, quiet cruelties. The way hope gets dangled in front of her like a carrot, only to be snatched away. The way she keeps getting up, keeps trying, and life keeps saying “not today, not ever.”
Nwokedi writes with a brutal honesty that feels almost invasive, like you’re reading someone’s diary entries from their darkest days. Her prose doesn’t prettify suffering or wrap it in metaphors that make it easier to digest. She makes you sit in it, feel it, and carry it with Adanna through every page.
Now let’s talk about the characters around Adanna. They were real. They weren’t villains in the traditional sense, just people as we see every day—flawed, selfish, wounded people making choices that destroy the person they claim to love. The kind of people you’ve probably met in real life. The ones who hurt you not because they’re evil, but because they’re broken and they don’t know how not to break others in the process.
What gutted me most was how Adanna kept her humanity through it all. She could have become bitter and closed off, and nobody would have blamed her. But she didn’t. And somehow that made it even worse to watch.
I don’t know what Adesuwa O’man Nwokedi went through to write this book, but I hope she’s healing from it. Because I refuse to believe this is just a story. It feels like someone pouring their pain onto pages and asking you to witness it, to acknowledge that this kind of suffering exists and that people survive it. Barely, but they do.
Will I recommend this book? Yes, but with a warning: Read it when you’re emotionally prepared. Read it when you have time to process what you’ve just experienced. Don’t read it on a casual Tuesday evening, thinking you’ll just breeze through. Adanna is not a book you breeze through. It demands your empathy and your full attention. And maybe a little touch of anger, swears, and heavy sighs.
Adanna is not an easy read. It’s not entertainment. It’s an experience. A harrowing, heartbreaking, beautifully written experience that will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.
But hey! At least you got a warning. I didn’t. 🙃
Ozioma is a writer who loves words. Reading them, writing them, but not always speaking them. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, and when she’s not reading, she’s coding or exploring something new just to see where it leads. She believes every good book deserves a real conversation. Curious by nature, restless by design.
