I have lived many lives inside this body. I understand that these feel irrelevant as she’s battling her gods, but I wasn’t able to understand her struggles without the context of her day-to-day life that was so detailed in the beginning.

She is having affairs all over the world, saving thousands of dollars for a plastic surgery, checking herself into a hospital for help and checking herself out, but there’s no mention of a job that pays for all these things or even where/how she lives. We learned about Ada’s parents, their divorce, her college experience meeting her roommate and then all those details fall away. They all live in a marble room in her head.My biggest issue with the book was the beginning and middle were very clearly set in reality. Many of the chapters are told in the voices of the gods. Over a tumultuous childhood she moved to the US for college where the gods/voices multiply and become stronger. It sounds like magical realism, but it’s more of a spiritual way of explaining schizophrenia. It follows a girl Ada who is born in Nigeria with what is called ogbanje - gods from another world trapped in her mind. It’s relatively short but took me a whole month to get through as I kept putting it down and picking up other books. I kept hearing about this debut novel Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi. Written with stylistic brilliance and based in the author’s realities, Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace. And when she travels to America for college, a traumatic event on campus crystallizes the selves into something powerful and potentially dangerous, making Ada fade into the background of her own mind as these alters-now protective, now hedonistic-move into control.

Born “with one foot on the other side,” she begins to develop separate selves within her as she grows into adulthood. Young Ada is troubled, prone to violent fits. The astonishing debut novel from the acclaimed bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, and Pet, Freshwater tells the story of Ada, an unusual child who is a source of deep concern to her southern Nigerian family. Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoreeįinalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for a Debut Novel