Against the Odds sucks the unwary reader into an emotional tsunami that holds you captive from the first page till it tosses you, breathless, unnerved, and spent, on the far shore. I started on that journey with a calmness that rapidly dissipated with a shocking thud as I began to agonize with Abeke, root for Omopede, celebrate Gift, and rail with despair and anger at the familiar scads of the vile and their uncanny penchant for disrupting women’s fortunes.
Adetanwa Odebiyi’s multigenerational narrative moves swiftly, yet it is so richly detailed that it stakes a claim as a fictional biography of many lives. Surely only life can yield characters painted in such complexity, contexts made lush in all their frustrating social realities and a shero who battles sexism and its internalization, cultures of patriarchy and gendered abuse, and the demeaning and isolating hierarchies of classism, with an achingly familiar admixture of weakness and verve.
Against the Odds is a novel for these times – a timely passionate intervention in climes where Nigerian women, black women, all women, continue to fight for change, for voice, and the right to actualize their unique identities and gifts. It would make for a powerful fictional complement to Women’s studies and culture courses and perhaps
someday even become a movie script.
Fiction
