The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria's Romance Scammers by Carlos Barragán

 

Hello my lovely readers! Back at it again with another review! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
Ikotun, one of Lagos’s poorest neighborhoods, lies ten miles and a world away from the towers and beaches at the heart of Nigeria’s megacity. By day, the market vibrates with the sound of traders hawking their wares. By night, thousands of workers of another kind begin their shifts in bars and crumbling apartments: these are the Yahoo Boys.

Mostly men in their teens and twenties, many turning to drugs to stay awake as they chat with “clients” overseas, the Yahoo Boys are online romance scammers. Whether impersonating male celebrities or anonymous young women, each year they catfish millions of dollars from victims. Some have attained the status of folk heroes, while thousands more “cash out” only to lose it all.

Inspired by his mother’s own brush with a scammer, the journalist Carlos Barragán takes us on a journey to understand the lives of the Yahoo Boys of Ikotun. We meet Biggy and Chibuike, each struggling with the temptations of fast money; Azeez, a tailor’s apprentice caught between the lure of crime and Nigeria’s economic crisis; and Richie, who is convinced that he’s responsible for the death of a woman in Kentucky he manipulated online for years.

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

Hello my lovely readers! I finished this book just in time for the end of Read Africa Month. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future.

However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ façades.

When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job—even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.

Ted Hughes: An Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate

Hello my lovely readers! This was my second book for the 12 Lives Challenge and probably my first and only book for Mega May, unless I'm able to finish the W.E.B. DuBois biography in time!

SYNOPSIS

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets.

With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letterwriter since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.

Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art.

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

Hello my lovely readers!

This was my first read for #ReadAfricaMonth and it's sat on my shelf for DECADES. I actually read through 70 percent of it and then forgot to pick it up again when I was 16. Longest soft DNF ever! Let's get into it. 

SYNOPSIS
Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.

QUICK REVIEWS pt. X

 A Most Tolerant Little Town by Rachel Louise Martin
The desegregation of Clinton High School in Clinton, Tennessee in 1956 by 12 Black students starts off mildly at first. Then the arrival of out of town pro-segregationists leads to violence, riots and eventually the bombing of the school.

*Good story about a little known Civil Rights history. I felt so bad for the students affected by the shenanigans that ensued. I'm glad that the author didn't censor word nigger throughout her book, but the audiobook version bleeped it out...even when it was read by a Black woman. Strange. 4 out of 5 stars.

Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
Two people living centuries apart in the same home, discover a door between their worlds. One of these people is a ghost and one of their stories about murder is a lie. 

*This was OK. I was kind of lost with the Japanese mythology, but it was still a fine novel. It also was a bit convoluted at times. 3 out of 5 stars.

A Harlem Wedding by Tiffany L. Warren

Hello my lovely readers!

This has been a slow reading month for me. I'm working through two THICK biographies (hi #MegaMay!)  one is about poet Ted Hughes and the other is about the father of who this book review is about, W.E.B. DuBois. Both are good, but incredibly dense and more than 500 pages. I'll finish them this month, but in the mean time, I blew through this book. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
A century ago, Harlem’s glittering social scene had a single Yolande Du Bois, the only child of N.A.A.C.P. icon W.E.B. Du Bois. Yolande was bold, vivacious, and beloved of every gossip columnist. A true daddy’s girl, Yolande followed her father’s advice on from where she went to college (Fisk—Papa’s alma mater) to which sorority she joined (Delta Sigma Theta). But in matters of the heart, Yolande and her father did not agree. Dr. Du Bois himself curated a string of handsome suitors from the “Talented Tenth” for her, but Yolande’s true love was jazz musician Jimmie Lunceford, son of a working-class family from far-off Denver, Colorado. Their romance was an open secret, and more than a little scandalous.

Despite it all, Yolande wound up marrying her father’s famed poet Countee Cullen. Their lavish uptown wedding was the hottest social ticket of 1928. With three thousand attendees, sixteen bridesmaids, and Langston Hughes as a groomsman, it was truly a sight to behold.

But, immediately after the wedding, Yolande’s carefully constructed fairy tale begins to crumble. Torn between the expectations of her father and society and her heart’s true desire, Yolande is forced to decide whether she must leave Harlem to create a more authentic life on her own terms.

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit

Hello my lovely readers! Another day, another re-read. Let's get into it. 

SYNOPSIS
What if you could live forever? In this timeless story young Winnie Foster learns of a hidden spring in a nearby wood and meets the Tuck family, whose members reveal their astonishing discovery of the spring’s life-changing power. Now Winnie must decide what to do with her newfound knowledge—and the Tucks must decide what to do with her. But it’s not just the curious girl who is interested in their remarkable tale. A suspicious stranger is also searching for the Tucks, and he will stop at nothing until he finds them and uncovers their secret.