Korede, the narrator, is a nurse, well versed in the cleaning properties of bleach and not fazed by handling the dead. That makes her the ideal person for her sister, Ayoola, to call when she has stabbed her boyfriend to death. It’s self-defence, she claims; again. In fact, he is the third, but when Korede tells Ayoola that this qualifies her as a serial killer, it is like water off a duck’s back. She’s right back on Instagram. It is left to Korode to do the worrying for both of them.
It is a responsibility she is accustomed to both while their abusive father was alive and since he died leaving their mother drifting in denial. When Ayoola goes astray, she shrugs and looks pretty, and Korede gets the blame for letting her get in trouble.
That is why Korede likes to keep home and work separate. In the hospital she is respected, if not liked, for her total professionalism. She is comfortable with that; except she would like Dr Tade Otumu to like her a bit more for herself as well as her work ethic. She holds a torch for him but realises she lacks the obvious feminine charms that her sister has in abundance. Lacking any other confidante, she unloads her romantic and criminal troubles onto the patient in room 313, Muhtar Youtai. He is in an irreversible coma and so in no position to judge her.
All seems fine, if not ideal, until two things happen. First, Ayoola turns up at the hospital for a social visit; Dr Otumu is smitten. Second, Muhtar Youtai miraculously exits his coma with perfect recall of Korede’s one-sided conversations. That all makes Dr Otumu a prospective corpse, and the sisters in danger of a life sentence.
The first person, present tense narrative gives the prose a pleasing immediacy, and the short chapters hurry it along too. The location is Lagos, and though the action mainly takes place indoors at the hospital or at home, the subsidiary characters bring in the flavour of the Nigerian setting.
It is good, dark
humour that also has something to say on the nature of sisterhood.
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