When I came upon this novel I was having a really difficult time finding something intriguing to read, I was also looking for something easier that I could pick up/put down at my leisure while traveling. It was in the top 10 best sellers on the
Kobo store website. I hate to say it but when a book has won an award it usually stands out for me. I may have never even heard of said award but I still tend to reach for one that has over one that hasn't and in many cases it can be completely irrelevant to the quality of the book. This book was the winner of the "
Scotiabank Giller Prize".
My Rating (via GoodReads): 3/5 stars
Kobo Price: $15.99
This is certainly not my favorite book by any means. I liked the premise of the story, it is based on a Nigerian scam where people presumably from Nigeria gather your information via email under the guise that they will be transferring you a large sum of money for whatever reason (such as inheritance, the most common I see in my junk email folder). People get caught up in this awful fraud, many of whom have apparently lost their life savings which is what happens to the main character's father. This type of fraud is called "advance fee fraud" and the actual title "419" refers to the article of the Nigerian criminal code dealing with fraud. I found all this very intriguing, partly because I've never heard of it and because I always wondered if anyone ever believed those emails in their junk folder.
This is the part I found misleading about the summary of the book: it mainly speaks about Laura, whom you would believe is the main character and her father, it ever so briefly mentions "a mysterious woman from the African Sahel with scars etched into her skin and a young man..". Now it may just be how I'm recalling the novel but I'd say the majority of the book is about the woman from the desert and the man who finds her. The novel was rather fragmented in that way, jumping around between characters, one would assume they all become significant in the end but it didn't really work out that way.
With some further reading I found that the writer, Will Ferguson, is a renowned travel writer. This totally came through in the novel, the scenery and the locations were all described in vivid detail, I enjoyed that part of it. I only gave this book 3 stars because I feel the character development was lacking as well for the fragmented aspect of it, it just didn't work for the plot and tone of the novel.
