Detailed plot synopsis reviews of Stay With Me |
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Yejide acted like nothing was wrong with Akin when she should have known from her wedding night that he couldn't get it up.
Yejide finally finds out that men are supposed to stick their dicks inside of women, and confronts Akin with this fact, which she claims she never knew.
Akin went to doctors to try to fix his dick but they couldn't, so he went to a "traditional herbalist" who gave him some "medicine", heh heh.
I didn’t have a cure—just diarrhoea like I’d never had before. I sat dazed, the watery stool soaking through my jeans while cars sped by.
Hahahahahaha!
Rotimi starts dying like kids #1 and #2. When Yejide finds out Rotimi is dying, she runs away.
Click here to see the rest of this reviewBut Rotimi doesn't die. She lives. Akin raises her and years later, at Akin's father's funeral, they meet Yejide again.
We are supposed to believe that Yejide was so convinced that Rotimi would die that she didn't stay around to watch it happen. We are supposed to believe that Akin couldn't find Yejide for many years. Both of these plot points are ridiculous.
Anyway, Yejide has a touching reunion with her now grown daughter.
The end
Literary Criticism:
I loved much of the first half of the book. There was adultery! There was tension between main characters! There was conflict between two wives! There was the unexpected twist of Yejide getting pregnant by Akin's brother, and a second unexpected twist when we learn that Akin planned it all! Very well plotted!
And the description of scenes was great too! I loved reading how Yejide poisoned her relatives, forcing them to shit in the bushes, and the bizarre scene where Yejide breastfed a goat, and the scene where Akin shit in his pants while taking the "cure" for a soft dick, and how Akin, watching Dotun bang Yejide, compared him to a grunting pig, heh heh heh.
But the second half of the story was lacking. First of all, much of it was unbelievable. Akin accidently pushed Funmi down the stairs and she just happened to die? Yejide had no idea that sex involved putting a dick inside of her? Akin never bothered to tell his mother that getting a second wife would be a waste of time?
Not believable.
The story was at its best in the middle of the book where Yejide was in conflict with Funmi and Dotun was boning Yejide. The conflict and competition between Yejide, Akin, Funmi, and Dotun could have filled the second half of the book quite easily, but the author took another direction, getting rid of Funmi and deflating much of the conflict with Dotun by making Dotun an agent of Akin. Once that was done the book became less interesting.
Stylistically, I didn't like how each chapter had different narrators and never announced who the narrator was, leaving the reader clueless to figure it out until pages later. The author was trying to be clever but came off as an asswipe for purposefully confusing the reader.
The other thing that was confusing about the book was that it jumped around in time too much.
First a child of Yejide would die. Then we would learn how the child was created, and that the child was sick. It was easy to get confused what timeframe we were reading about because the book jumped around so much. Also there were several children and it was unclear from the times that Dotun banged Yejide which times he was banging her to create which child.
The story should have been more direct in the telling, but with more conflict between the main four characters, and should have found a more realistic explanation for the plot other than "Yejide didn't know that sex involved a hard dick".
