3.5/5
226 pages
Summary: Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead. Korede's practicality is the sisters' saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood, the trunk of her car is big enough for a body, and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures of her dinner to Instagram when she should be mourning her "missing" boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit.
A kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where Korede works, is the bright spot in her life. She dreams of the day when he will realize they're perfect for each other. But one day Ayoola shows up to the hospital uninvited and he takes notice. When he asks Korede for Ayoola's phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and what she will do about it.
Sharp as nails and full of deadpan wit, Oyinkan Braithwaite has written a deliciously deadly debut that's as fun as it is frightening.
This book seems to be everywhere. I've seen multiple reviews, and it's appeared on all kinds of lists and blogs I follow. So - I had very high hopes. I mean, look at that cover art! Stunning. And the title! Thriller. Sadly, for me, those were the best points of this novel (really, it's a novella as the chapters are very short, some only sentences long). There is so much crammed into this short book, and with the added choppiness of the chapters, the pace is just off. This is a novel of scenes. Don't get me wrong, there are some gems in this book. The characters are interesting and the ending surprising - I just wanted this to be so much more than it is.
In her debut novel Julie Iromuanya presents Ifi and Job, a Nigerian couple in an arranged marriage, who begin their
lives together in Nebraska with a single, outrageous lie: that Job is a
doctor, not a college dropout. Unwittingly, Ifi becomes his
co-conspirator—that is until his first wife, Cheryl, whom he married for
a green card years ago, reenters the picture and upsets Job's tenuous
balancing act. The story is charming; it is funny, yet sad as these African immigrants seek to carve out a life for themselves in unfamiliar surroundings. They, along with the reader, learn that people everywhere are not so very different when it gets down to it. 
When the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria seceded in 1967 to form the
independent nation of Biafra, a bloody, crippling three-year civil war
followed. That period in African history is captured with haunting
intimacy in this artful page-turner from Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She tells this heart-breaking, gripping story primarily through the eyes
and lives of Ugwu, a 13-year-old peasant houseboy who survives
conscription into the doomed, unprepared Biafran army, and twin sisters Olanna and
Kainene, who are from a wealthy and well-connected family. Tumultuous
politics power the plot, and several sections are harrowing,
particularly passages depicting the savage butchering of Olanna and
Kainene's relatives. But this dramatic, intelligent epic has a beautiful and personal side as well: rebellious Olanna is the mistress of Odenigbo, a
university professor brimming with anticolonial zeal; while business-minded
Kainene takes as her lover fair-haired, blue-eyed Richard, a British
expatriate come to Nigeria to write a book about Igbo-Ukwu art. How this group is impacted by the brutality of war will stay with the reader for a very long time. It is a searing history lesson in
fictional form, intensely evocative and immensely absorbing.