Rootless - Krystle Zara Appiah - ★★

AUTHOR: Krystle Zara Appiah

GENRE: Relationship Drama

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: Supposed to be a story about a ‘British-Ghanaian marriage in crisis’. Turned out to be a story about two self-centered individuals who don’t know what marriage or parenthood means. Shallow unlikeable characters and jumpy plot development make this a ‘rootless’ novel, struggling to discover where it belongs. This is an outlier review.

Story Synopsis:

Sam, a UK native of Ghanaian origin, is the ideal student: sincere, focussed on becoming a lawyer.

Efe, newly arrived from Ghana and staying with her aunt in the UK, wants to study art history but her conservative family wishes for her to choose something more secure.

After many years of friendship, Sam and Efe gravitate towards each other and then towards marriage. But when it comes to beginning a family, their thinking doesn’t match. When Sam arrives home one day to find that Efe has run away to Ghana, the two of them need to decide if their marriage is worth fighting for.

The story is written in the third person limited perspective of Sam and Efe.

Where the book worked for me:

😍 Some of Efe’s concerns about parenting/being a mother were quite heartfelt and genuine. The story highlights how it is always the wife who needs to make the greater sacrifice when it comes to pregnancy or motherhood, no matter how understanding the husband.

😍 There were a few good insights into Ghanaian food and culture. (Not as many as or in the way I would have liked though.)

Where the book left me with mixed feelings:

😔 The story begins with the time of ‘Five months before’, then moves to ‘Nineteen years Before’, and steps ahead by one year in every chapter. Thus each year focusses on an important event in Sam’s and Efe’s lives, either together or individually. Gradually, the story reaches the initial time point, and continues to move ahead by a month or a week. Thus you know that zero hour is going to be something crucial. This writing choice helped cover a lot about the characters over the years, but at the same time, the fast-forwarded plot progression left me feeling as if I didn’t get to know them at all.

Where the book could have worked better for me:

😣 The story turned out to be a parenting drama as much as a marriage drama. However, the parenting issues were written very flatly. So wherever I should have felt tremendous emotions, I felt nothing! Well, maybe except irritation.

😣 Other than the date and time indication, there was nothing to suggest that the scene was taking place in 1997 or 2004 or so on. Every scene felt the same in its atmosphere and setting.

😣 A character-oriented story always works better with endearing characters. Here, I could stand neither Sam nor Efe. Their connection to each other wasn’t evident at all once their relationship moved towards the romantic. It was sad how a journey of nineteen years still didn’t make them communicate openly with each other, and how each felt like their point of view was the right one. Both were wrong in many ways, and sadly for the book, two wrongs didn’t make a right this time around.

😣 The plot development is very ad hoc. For instance, Efe was in the UK in her childhood, but after a traumatising incident, her parents took her and her sister back to Ghana and swore never to return to the UK again. Yet, these very parents send the two young girls back to the UK a few years later, all alone, without any worry about the past trauma. Similarly, Efe is highly passionate about her career, to the point of not wanting a child. And yet she escape to Ghana without any intimation to her workplace and isn’t in any hurry to come back.

😣 The writing is quite basic, I am sorry to say. There are references to some facts that comes up once in the plot and aren’t brought up ever again. There were even a few logical loopholes. Answer me this, ladies, as I am sure we all have gone through this at some point or the other. If your sanitary pad is overflowing, and you are *seated*, will you be able to see the blood trickling down your thighs? What kind of weird anti-gravity menstrual blood is this?!?!

😣 The ‘zero hour’ scene is so ridiculously out of place that I would have thrown the book at the wall had I had a physical copy. I hated the ending, not because of what happened but because of how it was written, almost like a ‘diabolus ex machina’.

😣 Every single Ghanaian character is straight out of the box. The overbearing parents and the interfering relatives are clichéd to the core. Efe’s sister, being the only decently likeable character in the whole book, is a minor exception, but even she has a fixed role to play. The Ghanaian part of the story seemed to emphasise only on the negatives of the country.

For a debut work, this is quite ambitious, probably too much so. Considering the heavy topics and dark emotions, maybe this could have turned out better in the hands of a more experienced writer.

To me, it was senseless and pointless to trudge through ‘Rootless.’ It didn’t provide what it promised. There are far better books about motherhood struggles and PPD out there, and this one just left me feeling blasé in comparison, with the flat and unlikeable characters adding to the frustration. Then again, this is an outlier opinion, so please go through the other gushy reviews and see if you want to give this a go.

My thanks to HarperCollins UK and NetGalley for the DRC of “Rootless”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.