Book 12/30.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
March is Women’s History Month and so the books I plan to read this month are all written by female authors 🤩💁♀️
Femi makes three, you know. Three, and they label you a serial killer.
My Sister, the Serial Killer is a tale of two sisters, one of whom is a serial killer and the other the resentful, yearning enabler. The story is narrated by Korede, the resentful, yearning enabler who, as we are told many many many times, is quite the plain Jane unlike her gorgeous, curvy, serial killer sister Ayoola, who always has men eating out of the palm of her hand. Except when she is killing them. Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she’s exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola’s phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she’s willing to go to protect her.
After I bought this book last year I put it up on my Instagram stories and a number of people reached out to me telling me how much they loved it and were excited for me to read it. That got me real excited to read it, but sadly it did not live up to its praise. For one, this was a 2019 Goodreads Choice Award nominee for Best Mystery & Thriller, but it was neither a mystery nor a thriller 😐 It was also said to be funny AF, and while I laughed a few times here and there, I found humour to be lacking for the most part. I did not like Korede. I found her inner dialogue to be jealous and bitchy, and her interactions with her colleagues to be quite rude. I also did not like Ayoola as I found her to be such a spoiled brat 🙄
For all the things I didn’t like about this book, I liked it enough to rate it 3 stars. My Sister, the Serial Killer is a quick, relatively entertaining book that you can read in one sitting. Literally. It took me about 2 ½ hours to read this and in that time I only got up from the couch to serve lunch. The author uses short chapters to move the story along quickly and through flashbacks in the chapters titled ‘Father’, we got to learn why Ayoola ended up the way she did and why Korede always cleans her messes. The setting adds great flavour to the story as I quite liked the socio-cultural portrayal of Lagos. I wish Oyinkan Braithwaite did more with the ending though as it fell a little flat.
** A guide to ratings **
1 star – did not like it
2 stars – it was okay
3 stars – liked it
4 stars – really liked it
5 stars – it was amazing
Lwile the Leo 