Romance Quest!: “The Spider King’s Daughter” by Chibundu Onuzo

I’m honestly a little annoyed by the library. Not for stocking this book --it’s fine-- but for how they catergorised it.

It’s not a romance.

“The Spider Kings Daughter” centers on Abike Johnson, the daughter of rich business man/organised crime boss and heir to his business throne, and a hawker, who came from a rich family that fell into poverty after his father died, and the budding romance between them.

And it’s fine.

That sounds like a criticism, and it kinda is? Like, this book definitely suffers from ‘first novel syndrome’: it’s not a bad book, but you can tell that the author’s next book is going to be better*?

And it’s a pretty good book: the characters are interesting, the romance plot engaging, and the plot does a good job of letting the novel be a character piece and a setting piece, which is what it really wants to be. (I wouldn’t say that the setting is a character-- but this book really wants to be about Lagos. It wants to be about the divide between rich and poor, the lack of a safety net, the conspicuous consumption, and the value of a naira**.)

And it’s kinda ~YA-ish and the formatting confused me early in the book, and one of the major characters doesn’t have a name (but his father does???)-- but it’s fine. It’s enjoyable.

But it’s not [spoilers spoilers spoilers] a romance.

...honestly, I’m glad I read When a Rake Falls first, so that I could get a taste of what actual good romance is like, because oh boy is this quest not going great. (This one is at least fine! But it’s not a romance!)

(Though I have found something promising in the library, and I have another in my pile. But the one in the library may have to wait, because I need to clear out my too read pile a bit. Would people be interested in ‘Romance Quest’ style summaries of books that are not romance?)

*Apparently she has written another book! I may have to check it out.

** It’s really interesting reading this book, when you only have a vague idea of how much a naira is, especially because the book doesn’t help you. I kept having moments of ‘if [thing 1] costs $X naira, and [thing 2] costs $X x 100 naira, how fucking much is a naira?’