And So I Roar breaks the jinx of sequels being let-downs. Although a coming-of-age fiction, it is a mature and sophisticated novel.
By Evidence Egwuono Adjarho
In an interview published in the New York Times, Abi Dare explains the eureka moment that led to her debut novel, The Girl With The Louding Voice. It was during a chat with her 8-year-old daughter.
What Dare thought would ultimately be a ‘closet story’ gained the love of many, especially with the impressionable protagonist. “I see myself in Adunni even though I’ve never been a housemaid,” I confessed to my sister upon completion of her first novel. And So I Roar, the sequel to Abi Dare’s debut novel, does not fall short of expectations.
The book is primarily about the lives of two characters: Adunni the intelligent and garrulous 14-year-old with dreams to liberate females through her education, and Ms Tia, a woman fighting for her sanity and happiness in her marriage.
Their lives entwine in the first book after Ms Tia’s decision to rescue Adunni from her former cruel boss, Big Madam. Our understanding of Ms Tia will experience a significant shift as the novel advances, in the way they do about the three protagonists in Aiwanose Odafen’s We Were Girls Once.
Readers who encountered Adunni in the first book are first drawn to her bravery and curiosity subsumed under her childish naivete. From a closer look, she strikes you as a multi-layered character full of intelligence, maturity, and humour.
The reason is glaring. Her child marriage to Morufu, the motherly responsibilities she takes on after the demise of her mother, and domestic drudgery in Big Madam’s house exposed her to life early.
The plot of both novels follow a cyclical pattern. In the first book, Adunni escapes from her village to Lagos and after years of hardship, finds love and friendship in Ms Tia. But in And So I Roar, she returns to the Ikati village much to her dismay, and the entirety of the plot unfolds there.
This happens on the eve of her resumption at Oceans Academy where she has secured a scholarship. Two men from her village locate her at Ms Tia’s home and demand her immediate presence at the village for a murder crime she had been accused of.
Adunni decides to return to her village to prove her innocence. In justifying her reason, she says to Ms Tia “To have a good name is better than a thousand and one education”.
Abi Dare is aware of the class divide in society and makes no pretense about it. She exemplifies this through the relationship between Ms Tia and Adunni. The latter jumbles up her tenses and mispronounces words, courtesy of her mother tongue in contrast to Ms Tia’s ‘polished’ English.
At the beginning of And So I Roar, Ms Tia exhibits a messiah complex, characteristic of the upper echelon in society who think wealth solves all problems. Thus, she goes with Adunni to Ikati to buy the latter’s release but realises her quixotic thinking.
Ms Tia and Adunni’s relationship is a testament that friendship is independent of social level or age. This vantage point is also echoed in Mamle Wolo’s The Kaya Girl (2022), a YA fiction about two girls from vastly different social backgrounds bonding as best friends.
Abi Dare’s writing about friendship hits readers hard because she bares both Ms Tia and Adunni – their vulnerabilities, fears, and weaknesses– to which their friendship is the salve.
But And So I Roar is more than a book on friendship. It is also about female struggles and the minutiae of being female in a society rife with patriarchal turpitude. A cursory reading of the book reflects this.
Adunni must offer a sacrifice for the drought the village experiences which is in fact caused by the villagers’ action of felling trees, Ms Tia suffers heavily for her inability to have children when it is her husband who is impotent. Zenab and the other women introduced later in the book face similar scapegoating as evinced through their stories.
The author recognises the transformative power of education to the girl-child and it is this she advocates through the ‘louding’ voice of Adunni. There is a stark difference between educated and uneducated Adunni. Her education enlightens her and this manifests in her book, “The Very Important Small Book of Life’s Little Wisdom”:
When you send a girl to school, her whole village will eat the fruit of it, especially including you, the sender.
And So I Roar breaks the jinx of sequels being let-downs. Although a coming-of-age fiction, it is a mature and sophisticated novel. You feel a lot of emotions dance around you. You cry, you laugh, you gnash your teeth in anger, you sigh, but you do not stop reading.
Is And So I Roar better than the debut novel? Both novels made their marks and I could not have asked for a better sequel. However, the pacing of this book made me raise my eyebrows. It was a long night quite literally as all the actions took place in the stretch of a single night.
While this does not make the novel less interesting, it made me impatient. I yearned badly for the night to be over. Then the book ends in a rush, almost like Dare had been waiting, like me, to get through the night.
Yet, this book was an un-put-down-able read for me. In the two days I read it, I experienced a rollercoaster of emotions, but finally, catharsis. This time, I am content with how the sequel ends. I daresay Dare has put a full stop to the story of Adunni from the convenient ending of the book. Still, writers cannot be trusted.
If The Girl With The Louding Voice is a bowl of ice cream, And So I Roar is the rich, velvety whipped cream that crowns it.
Evidence Egwuono Adjarho is a Gen-Z who loves God. She enjoys reading books and writing about them. Finally, she is an undergraduate studying English at the University of Lagos.