This was a very interesting read!! I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect but had been told it was a great one so I dove in! I really loved Feyi and her story! She was such a strong woman even when she didn’t feel like it! I was surprised at her choices but enjoyed the story!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

I really enjoyed this book, but I also very much understand why a lot of people really do not like it. I really love Akwaeke's writing style, it's just so captivating, and it just draws me in each time.

I think this book was very real and very raw. The dialogue between these characters just felt so honest and genuine. I feel like sometimes characters in books have such awkward and jilted conversations, but this book felt especially real.

I can't wait to read more books by this author!

Best book of 2022. Akwaeki Emezi has once again, conquered a new genre with You Made a Fool... Every bit of beauty and messiness exemplifies the perfection of the romance genre. I never wanted this to end.

I was offered a widget for this book and I’ve put off reading it. Honestly, for me it was just OK. The romance felt forced and it just wasn’t for me.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed as in this review are completely my own.

I really wanted to love this book as much as I loved The Death of Vivek Oji and I just didn't. That's OK- I think it just wasn't the book for me and I went into it with nooo idea what it was about or what to expect (I just knew it had a gorgeous cover and a very intriguing title).

I really enjoyed the beginning of the book and was excited to see where Feyi's life was going to lead. She's been mourning the sudden and tragic death of her husband for 5 years now, but she's still in quite young and still finding herself. She's finally starting to open up to the idea of dating again, but is understandably having a tough time with it.

I don't want to give anything away, but I'll just say that the main romance in the book just didn't feel super believable to me and this was the toughest issue I had with the book. A crazy fun infatuation, sure. But talking about love and marriage and blowing lives up within weeks? I just couldn't buy it. But that could also just be me not liking love at first sight "tropes" and not necessarily believing in them in real life. I also had a bit of trouble with some of the confrontations between characters. Violence is never OK, but I also think things were overall handled poorly and very unsympathetically. Love conquers all and I understand the idea of your own personal happiness being the priority in life, which I think is what the author wanted to portray, but at what cost to others? Again, probably my own personal issue!

I can certainly see how this would be a polarizing book. It's most definitely very beautifully written from the settings to the food to the emotions and I do think that's a good reason to read it even if you may not necessarily agree with the decisions of the characters.

This book is vibrant and lush both in setting and the writing. It’s rich and drenched in emotion. It’s about grief, anger, love and loss. Beautiful book.

Akwaeke Emezi's intriguing title drew me to this book, as well as my enjoyment of other books I have read by this author, who's not afraid to people their stories with difficult characters and tackle difficult situations.

Feyi is beginning to come alive; her husband died in a car crash five years earlier and she has had a terrible time dealing with his death. After moving to New York City, moving in with her irrepressible friend Joy, she returns to making art and to seeking out interactions.

She becomes involved with a young man, but doesn't want to move their relationship, which is a friendship currently, further until she feels comfortable. When she meets his father, she is instantly electrified and attracted to him. Knowing this is a situation that could blow up in her face, she does her best not to give in to her feelings. The thing is, despite their age difference, which is nineteen years, the two feel deeply for each other, and take the time to have serious conversations about how a relationship between them will affect everyone in their lives.

Though I was uncomfortable with the relationship between Feyi and the much older man, Emezi handles the situation really well, and I ended up enjoying this book.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Atria Books for this ARC in exchange for my review.

a beautiful love story. Emezi is a stunning writer and she paints such majesty into her writing with rich history incorporated of Africa.

Read this if you want to explore…. Grief, love, coming of age, acceptance, aging, family, friendships, sexuality and more. Pretty steamy at times too, which is not my favorite.

Emezi can do no wrong. What a great exploration of grief, life, and being open to the unexpected. I loved the way this book challenged me and pushed me outside of the comfort zone I usually stay in when it comes to relationship dynamics. I loved these characters, the way they were human and messy and alive. I’m so excited to get more romance from Emezi in the future.

When I was offered this widget by the publisher, I fell for the cover.. but I definitely learned my lesson with that. This book did not work for me. People do not really act like this, and if they do, I do not know these people or don’t want to.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

4.5-5 stars

I was thoroughly engaged in the story of Feyi and her tumultuous journey to find love. Emezi's writing is truly a highlight of the book, with vivid and passionate prose that immerses the reader in the world of the story. The characters are rich and the story compelling, with Feyi making a series of choices that are both captivating and, at times, cringeworthy.

One of the things I appreciated most about this book was its raw representation of reality. Emezi does an excellent job of exploring the messy, complicated nature of love and relationships, and the result is a deeply heartfelt romance novel that is strongly resonated with me. However, I did have some issues with the ending. It seemed as though Emezi was attempting to wrap things up neatly, but I couldn't help feeling that the consequences of certain actions should have been more far-reaching.

Overall, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty is an engaging and emotional read that I would recommend to anyone looking for a thought-provoking and complicated love story.

Note: this review was written by me but modified by the openAI chatbot to improve it.

I ended up adoring this story of grief and finding love again from Akwaeke Emezi. This is a must read for those who love love in all of its complexity.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
rating: 4⭐️
genre: contemporary fiction
read this if you liked:

I’m not typically one to judge a book by its cover, but damn if this cover is not SO GOOD! I purchased this book based on the cover alone and went into this one mostly blind. I’m really glad I did because it was so nice for the story to unfold for me without knowing what was to come. What a wild, steamy ride it was! This book gripped me from the very start and didn’t let up until the end. The tension in the book heated up quickly and made for a fun, steamy summer read. I enjoyed that this book wasn’t simply a romance book but also had themes of love, grief, finding yourself, and friendship as well. It was equally as thought provoking. Feyi was such a fantastically written main character and I loved seeing her growth throughout the book. This author quickly got added to my *auto buy* list!

I have some complicated feelings about this book. On one hand, you have the soul-consuming writing of Akwaeke Emezi, who until this book has usually gotten 5 stars across the board. On the other, I just completely struggled with the plot and character choices in this story. I was at times at war with myself, but ultimately, I could not get behind the romance at all.

Regardless of any struggles with the plot itself, the writing truly is superb. The characters feel real, and Emezi writes them so fully fleshed out. And I appreciate how Emezi pulls out the complex feelings of love and grief and sadness that definitely resonated. The problem is that I could not get behind the dubious family dynamics at the center of the romance, it just did not make me feel good! And I need my romance to make me fully root for both of the characters, and I could not do that here.

I will absolutely continue reading anything Emezi puts out, but this one did not fully grab me.

I wasn't crazy about this novel about a May-December romance between a young woman and her boyfriend's father. Rather than the deep romance described by the central character, their relationship seemed to me another example of a successful older man preying on the vulnerability of a beautiful young woman.

I'm trying to figure out where to begin with this one. Okay…here goes! After 5 years of mourning, and at the insistence of her best friend/roommate/?, Feyi decided to stay socializing. I don't think anyone was prepared for that opening scene! Did anyone else catch that Milan was at the party with his girlfriend? Then, there's his friend Nasir, who I think was genuinely catching feelings for her, but while she's "figuring it out" and talking it slow, Feyi is now attracted to his father, of all people.

The main character, Feyi was depicted as Miss Loose Booty, and I'm not sure if she was using sex as a mask to cover up her Survivor's Remorse or her actual mourning. And another thing…we never found out who was actually driving the car, which would somewhat explain why she never drove after the accident. Somehow, I felt like something was missing.

Once Nasir and Feyi get to the island, I was enthralled by the cuisine, which gave me a taste of my Caribbean roots. Alim, is a layered character, but this is where it gets interesting. I believe he is the most transparent character in this book. You take him or you leave him, which leads to another thing. Was it just me, or was everybody bi-sexual in this book?

In conclusion, this book lacked the developmental editing that it needed. The readers should not have been left many open-ended questions. I do recommend that you read it for yourself, because it definitely has potential.

This is a very good book with some very big problems. I love how it pushes the romance genre to stretch and include types of romance, characters, and the personal histories of characters that it normally doesn't. Many people read romance because of its predictability, and therefore safety, and they're not going to be happy with this book, because it doesn't fit the norms of the genre. And I think that's good, in that the stretching of the definition of romance to include others will ultimately strengthen and expand the genre. Inclusion is good.

That being said, and even though the book had me nearly to tears in the first chapter, there are some serious plot and character development issues that have been covered extensively in other reviews, which kept me from enjoying the book as much as I hoped.

So, I ended up listening to this on audio and I just have to say that the narrator was amazing. I will return an audiobook and read it physically if I don't vibe with the audiobook narrator, but this narrator was great and I would absolutely listen to their other books!
Anyways, I enjoyed this so so much more than I was expecting. Honestly, I don't love the cover or the title and I think that's why I put off reading it for so long. I don't even think that I fully realized that it was romance at first. From the blurb and the title, I was thinking that it was going to be literary but it was definitely a romance. It's messy and spicy and aside from the main character's trauma from losing her husband, it's really not that deep either in my opinion. I especially loved the main character and her best friend's relationship and could've probably read a whole book about just them two! I loved all of it. It was exactly what I was in the mood for although upon reading some poor reviews I do understand where people are coming from. Even so, as I said, this was totally for me.

With that said, I was really disappointed to see that someone wrote a poor review about this book and the author somehow took it out of context and aired them out on Twitter. I find this really unprofessional. I was looking for the tweet and wasn't able to find it but I did find a thread of tweets from the author about this book where they say about people who don't like the characters... "FOOL OF DEATH features a metric fuckton of profanity, and queer Black girls fucking their way through Brooklyn. They do not give a fuck about getting or keeping a man, so if you’re a pick me who loves respectability politics, you might be offended by these characters." Calling people who don't jive with your book for whatever reason "pick-me"s is so crazy to me. And rude. For that reason, I'll be staying away from this author in the future.

Unfortunately, I couldn't connect with this book. Try as I did, the characters didn't pull me into the story as I hoped they would.