The Talk of the Party by Foluso Agbaje

Hello my lovely readers! I'm just chugging along on these reviews lately! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
In a family built on lies, what happens when the truth comes out?

Bukola Obanile’s 60th birthday party is the hottest ticket in town. But champagne isn’t all that is being served…

The Obaniles picture-perfect life is the envy of all Lagos society, and everyone wants a piece. So, when renowned matriarch Bukola’s birthday approaches there are no expenses spared, five hundred guests are invited, and her four children all in attendance. Everything will be perfect, just as planned.

Except living the dream comes at a price and, as the party draws closer each of the Obanile children find themselves embroiled in scandals that could shatter the flawless reputation their mother has carefully built.

As the music builds and chandeliers glitter, this one perfect night could be all it takes to destroy a family built on deception…

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.

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Hello my lovely readers! I was duped again by this author. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
When Ebun gives birth to her daughter, Eniiyi, on the day they bury her cousin Monife, there is no denying the startling resemblance between the child and the dead woman. So begins the belief, fostered and fanned by the entire family, that Eniiyi is the actual reincarnation of Monife, fated to follow in her footsteps in all ways, including that tragic end.

There is also the matter of the family curse: “No man will call your house his home. And if they try, they will not have peace...” which has been handed down from generation to generation, breaking hearts and causing three generations of abandoned Falodun women to live under the same roof.

When Eniiyi falls in love with the handsome boy she saves from drowning, she can no longer run from her family’s history. As several women in her family have done before, she ill-advisedly seeks answers in older, darker spiritual corners of Lagos, demanding solutions. Is she destined to live out the habitual story of love and heartbreak? Or can she break the pattern once and for all, not only avoiding the spiral that led Monife to her lonely death, but liberating herself from all the family secrets and unspoken traumas that have dogged her steps since before she could remember?