This book’s review meme is for my Love & Hip Hop fans. For those of y’all that are exceeding your reading goals instead of catching up on VH1, here’s a little context LOL.

Now, for my less profane thoughts: His Only Wife is an enthralling story about two Ghanian families, one love triangle, and the people and places caught in between them.

I mention place because Peace Adzo Medie accomplishes a wonderful pull-and-push between the two main geographic settings in the story: the big city (Accra) and the country town (Ho) where many of the central characters are from. There are also many shadow places in this story: the childhood home of Afi (our narrator), which represents her immediate family’s former status when her father was living; the various offices and business locations of Afi’s husband, Eli; and the shadow homes that Eli shares with his mysterious partner, Muna. This “other relationship” is one of the central tensions of this story, and it is mostly described through a host of misinformation from Eli’s family, the Ganyos.

While Eli and Muna’s relationship is the most obvious source of Afi’s strife, it wasn’t handled well enough to become the most *compelling* tension in this story (more on that later.) For me, that prize goes to Afi’s internal tension between her familial duty and her personal wellbeing. This book does a great job of sinking you deep into the oppressive notions of womanhood and “wifeliness” that are placed upon Afi from the onset of her marriage. These expectations expose the simultaneous beauty and burden of family, which can be both comforting (such as Afi’s relationship with her cousin Mawusi) and a source of intense strife (such as the relationship with her uncle Pious.) Afi is expected to uphold these many familial relationships while also joining the Ganyo family, where she is tasked with ensuring that her husband leaves his mistress. This is partially due to a “debt” Afi and her mother are alleged to owe Eli Ganyo’s mother, a woman who provided shelter and work for them when they were in need. This financial manipulation impacts Afi’s relationship with her own mother, who often cowers under the power dynamic she has been subjugated to since her husband’s death. Afi’s mother’s ingrained sense of fealty to Eli’s mother leads her to heap significant expectations on her daughter to be the perfect wife to an imaginary husband. The book is most cathartic in the moments when Afi gathers the courage to put herself before her societal obligations, many of which are unfair to her and the less fortunate women in this story (such as Muna.)

I’m giving this book four stars because I do feel like the pacing was a bit bizarre. While I enjoyed each page of this novel, as we got further through the halfway mark, I found myself surprised that we *still* hadn’t come to the must-have meeting between Afi and Muna. I think the scene Peace Adzo Medie does provide is well-crafted, but just too late in a relatively short novel to make up for the many questions we have about this other relationship. After the incident, we speed towards what feels like a hasty conclusion. The process of Afi realizing Eli could never give her what she wanted in a relationship could have easily been twelve chapters, especially as she shares this revelation with her family members. The conversations where Eli and his sister fully reveal their true feelings about Afi are so telling, and they could have landed so much harder with the adequate space and time. Eli and Yaya’s final confrontations with Afi keenly expose how the Ganyo family’s entire structure and self-worth is deeply rooted in patriarchy and class antagonism. This produces undue pressure for the Ganyo children (Eli, Fred, Richard, and Yaya) as well as financial and emotional abuse for those they deem beneath them. I think it would have been incredibly helpful for Peace Adzo Medie to peel back the curtain on how these “isms” have impacted the Ganyo’s lives, in the same way she portrays the societal burden placed on Afi’s shoulders. Instead, we brush past Eli and Yaya’s final scenes so quickly that I barely felt they had time to land with Afi, let alone the readers.

Finally, I think the revelation of Muna is so anticlimactic because while we quickly learn that the little Afi knew about her was incorrect, there is limited space given in the book to rewrite that misinformation. I didn’t really question the Ganyo’s narrative of Afi as “the good wife” and Muna as “the wicked Liberian woman” until it was too late, which perhaps speaks to my own internalized misogyny. Maybe it was easy for me to believe this narrative because it’s not too different from harmful narratives I’ve heard in my own culture and family that I’m still working to unlearn (so and so’s girlfriend is a gold digger, this person “couldn’t keep a man” and that’s why they were cheated on, etc.) I would have easily read another hundred pages that allowed Afi to learn more of Muna’s side of the story about Eli and the Ganyos, and allowed readers like me to unravel our ingrained assumptions about “the other woman.” In many senses, it would be more accurate to call Afi the other woman, and I think hearing more from Muna would allow this to be a clearer point in the novel. We largely think of Afi as the “legitimate wife” because of an official ceremony she had and Muna’s alleged indesire to participate in Eli’s culture, but this tells us nothing about the actual conditions of either relationship. Those conditions could include more of the intimacies between Muna and Eli that Afi glimpses in their home, intimacies that mirror or maybe even exceed Afi and Eli’s best moments. Comparing both relationships in terms of each party’s treatment of the other could’ve allowed this novel to shed some light on the possibilities of ethical non-monogamy and polyamory. By detailing how both relationships had positive components, we could see more clearly what *could have been* healthy relationships on either side. In other words, we’d see the central problem was not the very nature of a person having multiple partners, but that this specific person was dishonest and manipulative in his partnerships.

In this way, more time “in the light” about Muna and Eli’s relationship would’ve helped cement Eli as the central villain of this story—having reached the end, I am kind of peeved at his portrayal. For at least half of the novel, he is painted as a troubled son and charming sex symbol who is just trying his best to make everyone happy, instead of A GROWN MAN WHO CALLS HIS WIFE UNREASONABLE FOR WANTING TO LIVE IN THE SAME HOUSE AS HIM. For a long time, Afi (and gullible readers like me!) viewed Eli at least slightly favorably thanks to the misinformation from his family. Once this is stripped away, it’s clear that Eli is a selfish, spoiled man who desires a polyamorous lifestyle without any ethical structure to undergird it. If we heard more from Muna, I think we would come to see the similarities between her and Afi’s experience, as both women were treated unfairly by the man they love, as well as his family.

Even without this ultimate resolution, I’m thankful for the time I was able to spend with this book, and would definitely recommend it to others! If people are trying to finish their 2020 reading goals, this is one you won’t be able to put down until you complete it! :)