Navigating college life is one of the hardest tasks an individual can be faced with. This is because every single day, the individual gets to interact with different calibres of people. People from all walks of life. A little tilt in the wrong direction can prompt very profound reactions from these individuals, leading to unexpected outcomes.
My admiration goes to people who were able to go through college and came out in one piece, unscathed. Newsflash; only about a percent of individuals were able to scale through college in one piece and the rest? What happened to them? A simple answer would be ‘a lot of things’, some of which I would be discussing today courtesy of a book by an excellent author.
About The Book.
“Honey and Spice” by Bolu Babalola is contemporary romance literature that was initially released on the 21st of June, 2022. The five hundred and seventy paged novel revolves around the life of Kiki Banjo, a twenty year old student of the Whitewell college.
Kiki is a relationship-evasion expert and host of a popular students radio show–Brown sugar. The ambitious and intelligent Kiki makes it her mission to ensure the women of Whitewell college do not fall into the mess associated with situationships, casanovas and heartbreaks. Kiki got accolades for being able to see through charming seducers, play them at their own game and emerge unscathed. Things went relatively smoothly for Kiki until she met Malakai, a new student who was equally very intelligent. From here, things begin to take a turn.
My Opinion
This book was nothing short of amazing although it started off really slow for me. The author seemed to have excessively dragged the first few chapters and honestly, I had almost given up on the novel. After the characters were properly introduced, the plot started unravelling and this was when the action began proper, leading to an unputdownable novel.
This brings me to character development. For the first time in a long time, an author awed me with their character development. All the characters were properly accounted for and with each chapter, readers got a chance to understand the characters even better.
One thing I can say for sure is that this novel made me appreciate love even more than I already do. When the love story between different sets of people was introduced, I couldn't suppress my intermittent giggles. This set of people demonstrated love in its purest form, just the way it should be. I need not mention that there was so much tension surrounding this novel. Tension from rival groups, tension from lovers and even tension from lecturers. The palpable tension was one of the reasons why this novel was such a good read.
Another thing I'll like to highlight is the admirable demonstration of unity and like-mindedness amongst the college students. They all traded different paths but when it was time to put heads together, they set aside their rivalry and drama to do just that.
One character with a contagious degree of resilience was Kiki banjo. Kiki, as a character, had gone through a traumatising event in the past. An event that haunted her every single day. But her willingness and ability to rise above this trauma, even when she had subsequently faced a similar event again, made her character even more laudatory.
During the course of the novel, the lyrics of a song were repeated more than twice; a song that had been placed on repeat on my playlist months before I came across the novel. This only made the novel more appealing as I could easily relate to the song and how the lyrics matched the scenarios they were used in.
Finally, I would like to commend the author for the tone of this novel. I expected regular words and standard vocabulary when reading but that wasn't the case. The vocabulary itself felt very premier, and aside from the sprinkles of African slang and ideologies, I wouldn't have guessed this piece was written by an African author.
Recommendation
Honey and Spice is a generally lovely book, one good enough to bring a person out of their reading slump. Surprisingly, I finished it in under twenty-four hours and this only goes to show how much I enjoyed reading it. As such, I would give it a 4.5/5.0 rating because it is definitely worth the read.
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All other images are screenshots from my e-library.
Liebe🤍