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** spoiler alert ** I was impressed enough with Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street to be interested in reading more from this Nigerian-born author. Her new novel is quite different from that earlier one, though the two books have some common elements: three young women (this time actual sisters) as central characters and stories that focus on entrapment and abuse. Nani, the main character and eponymous middle daughter, is a teenager when the trouble begins. Her older sister, Udodi, away at university in the US, is killed in a car accident. Then, within a couple of years, her beloved father, Doda, dies from pancreatic cancer. Nani attributes all that subsequently befalls her to those original tragic losses.

Always a top student, she quickly falls behind in school and is no longer even able to imagine pursuing a medical education abroad. She also fails to remain emotionally connected to friends. Brisk and energetic Mother and Nani’s lively younger sister, Ugo, have moved on and re-engaged with life. They can neither understand Nani nor shake the almost mute girl out of melancholia. She spends afternoons sitting in the beautiful garden in front of the family’s spacious home in a gated community in Enugu, a predominantly Christian/Igbo city in southeastern Nigeria. The family is very well-to-do: Doda had an important civil service job and Mother has recently opened the highly lucrative “Rejoice Maternity Clinic.�(view spoiler)[It’s a hidden-in-plain-sight illegal business: Mother sells the unwanted babies of teenage girls to wealthy couples. (hide spoiler)]

Nani only learns the truth about her mother’s work from Ephraim, an extremely odd Cameroonian who befriends her. He’s willing to listen to her speak of the dead when no one else is. Bombastic and bizarre, he’s an itinerant evangelical preacher, who’s somehow gotten himself into the high-end neighbourhood to share the gospel. Nani has no romantic attraction to him—who could? His ludicrous “bamboozling� of his audience with “the sizableness of [his] vocabulary� coupled with his inability to pronounce the letter “l� make it hard to appreciate the threat he poses. By the time he tells Nani: “You make me a raffing stock,� and “I rove you . . . but you make me so angry,� we understand that he’s dangerous, but it’s still hard not to laugh. I think Unigwe should’ve thought twice about diluting this character’s malevolence with a speech impediment.

Most of the plot revolves around Ephraim’s “abduction� of Nani. He invites her to a Christian forgiveness vigil and when she misses curfew and won’t be able to re-enter her family’s compound, he suggests that she stay at his house. (view spoiler)[There he rapes and impregnates her. Later he’s Christian enough to forgive her for seducing him. (hide spoiler)]. Nani briefly returns home, but, unable to confide in her sister or mother (for whom the purity of her daughters is paramount) and growing increasingly distraught, she believes Ephraim to be the only one she can turn to. He offers her nothing but marriage “ordained by God,� followed by incarceration in the home, domestic abuse, and two more pregnancies.

The remainder of the novel concerns Nani’s efforts to get away from her captor. There’s a hitch, of course, and a big one: she needs to wrest her children from her husband. Nani’s sister, Ugo, has re-entered the picture at this point, just before fleeing to the US with Mother. The two will return to Nigeria when the investigation into Mother’s illicit business activities dies down. In the meantime, these two are urging Nani to come to the US without the kids.

I knew nothing about this book going into it. Partway through, apparently slow on the uptake, I happened to glance at a blurb on the back cover which, to my surprise, described it as a retelling of the myth of Persephone. I hadn’t made anything of Ephraim’s regular gifts of fruit; it was only when the flowers quite pointedly started dying off that I started to see any parallels. Nani can pass as Persephone, I suppose: she’s naïve and easily lured. She certainly lands in hell . . . but that’s where the parallels end. Ephraim seems an unlikely Hades—he’s too cartoonish� and by no stretch of the imagination is Nani’s mother a Demeter figure. Only at the end, does she mourn and mostly her own failure to assist. Her work—profiteering from teenage fertility—isn’t exactly Demeter’s either, but the business does take a nosedive after Nani’s marriage to Ephraim.

At about the halfway point, I thought Unigwe was just spinning her wheels, her novel mired in melodrama and going nowhere. It began to read like young-adult fare. Nani becomes a broken record. She cites Ephraim’s abuses ad nauseam and endlessly laments her mother’s lack of concern and failure to understand her middle daughter’s commitment to her children. It all becomes very tiresome. Part of the trouble is that Unigwe gives the reader no real reason to love these kids —offputtingly named Holy, PraiseHim, and Godsown by their father. This reader was certainly not invested in their story.

Unigwe’s book did begin with some promise. For one thing, it has an interesting structure. Most chapters are told from Nani’s first-person point of view, but there are some sections concerning the youngest sister, Ugo, which are written in the the third person. Other chapters are presented as a poetic chorus from the point of view of Udodi, the dead sister. These contain many lines in Igbo and sometimes make reference to myths I’m unfamiliar with. Having left the earthly plain, Udodi has a clear view of events but can do little more than make philosophical remarks about them.

In the end, the book bored me. I think a lot of the problem comes down to Ephraim. It’s not that I haven’t known pompous, righteous, and even emotionally abusive types; it’s that Unigwe hasn’t made him feel real. Come to think of it, none of the characters is particularly interesting or credible. I needed to believe in these people for the story to work, and I simply could not.

Rating: 2.5 rounded down