Freshwater

SUSAN STRAIGHT, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

"The novel is based in many of the realities of the writer's life, but the prose is infused with imaginative lyricism and tone. In the end, this coming-of-age novel also has one foot on the other side, held between the open gates — a young woman of many nations and many souls. The journey undertaken in the novel is swirling and vivid, vicious and painful, and rendered by Emezi in shards as sharp and glittering as those with which Ada cuts her forearms and thighs, in blood offering to Asughara ... Emezi's lyrical writing, her alliterative and symmetrical prose, explores the deep questions of otherness, of a single heart and soul hovering between, the gates open, fighting for peace."

SAM SACKS, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

"..[a] witchy, electrifying story of danger and compulsion ... Ms. Emezi has wholly reshaped and reinvigorated the painful spectacle by imagining it from the perspective of the trickster gods who possess her ... Its conclusion is as striking and mysterious as the ways of the gods who narrate it. In recent years, books like Chigozie Obioma's The Fishermen and Ayobami Adebayo's Stay With Me have found new angles of perception for familiar stories of love and grief. Ms. Emezi's debut is the latest standout in this exciting boom in the Nigerian novel."