Ada's Realm

I liked this a lot! I think I would classify it as speculative fiction? Ada moves through time and space and worlds and through it all, she learns what it means to hold space for oneself and be the kind of woman people aspire to. Feels like the kind of book that would be taught in a literature class. Lots to unpack in a good way.

Sharon Dodua Otoo's debut novel Ada's Realm is an ambitious and highly creative narrative of strength and resilience of women throughout time. By writing from multiple perspectives, from past to present, the story weaves together an astounding picture of feminine life that all women can relate to and find courage from.

The reader is taken on an emotional journey with the character of Ada through many tragedies, sorrows and injustices she must overcome in her journey to becoming the strong and courageous woman she is. While it's an incredibly dark novel in some ways, it is simultaneously full of humour, compassion and beauty, giving the reader hope in even the bleakest of situations.

The writing in this novel is stunning - Otoo creates a highly descriptive atmosphere with an evocative writing style that captivates the reader, making it impossible to put the book down. Ada's Realm is a masterpiece and will remain a lasting reminder of the importance of fighting for what's right and valuing the struggles of all women throughout the centuries.

Sharon Dudoa Otoo’s intricate, debut novel grew out of her lingering fascination with Ada a minor figure in Otoo’s award-winning short story “Herr Grottup Sits Down.” Here Ada is caught up in cycles of rebirth linked to beliefs central to Ghana’s traditional Akan religion. Ada first surfaces in 1459 as a displaced, grieving mother in a coastal village in pre-colonial West Africa, her experiences intersecting with the catastrophic impact of Portuguese explorers intent on mining gold. Ada then reappears in England in 1858, a version of Ada Lovelace, her life complicated by a frustrating affair with author Charles Dickens and her relationship with her Irish maid Lizzie. In another incarnation, Ada finds herself in Nazi Germany, one of many women in a Lagerbordel, there to provide sex and “pleasure” for a select band of male prisoners. Finally a contemporary Ada leaves her home in Ghana to study in Berlin where an unexpected pregnancy and difficulties in finding accommodation confront her with the realities of being Black in a country dominated by whiteness.

In Otoo’s non-linear narrative, multiple timelines fray and overlap, slowly bleeding together, as Ada is forced into an awareness of the relationships between past and present, and the significance of buried histories. Ada’s journey is partially represented through conventions drawn from a fertile mix of magical realism and Afrofuturism. As in the earlier short story, a central character and commentator is an inanimate object, for Herr Grottrup an egg that refuses to be boiled, here at various points a broom, a room and a British passport pre-Brexit. An object that crucially remembers the things that each Ada has forgotten, her past glimpsed through random images, disconnected memories and the imprint of past traumas. In each era Ada is searching for a safe space, akin to the room dreamt of by Virginia Woolf, a place of liberation and creativity. Recurring themes highlight historical forms and instances of exploitation and othering from slavery to the Potato Famine and the treatment of Irish people in nineteenth-century England, through to fascism, contemporary manifestations of racism and cultural appropriation. Otoo’s isn’t, strictly speaking, an historical novel as much as it’s a novel about colonialism and the way in which legacies of the past haunt and shape the present. Otoo’s vision is sometimes based on research, sometimes inspired by readings of writers like Akala, and often inflected by her interest in the work of Brecht, Morrison, May Ayim and Buchi Emecheta.

It’s a fiercely political, committed work, clearly influenced by concepts of intersectionality, in keeping with Otoo’s experience as a political activist; while the later Berlin sections draw from her position as a Black British author based in Germany and writing in German. Despite its ambitious, outwardly-challenging structure, it’s a very accessible piece, with a strong emphasis on vivid storytelling, although it could also feel a little forced and didactic at times and I found some episodes much less convincing than others. Translated by Jon-Cho Polizzi