They dream big, though, and they never make excuses about why they are there. In fact, big dreams are why the women decide to work in the sex trade in exchange for passage to Europe, which they view as a paradise of opportunity and riches, far removed from the crushing squalor and bleak opportunities in Africa.
The question of what makes a victim is very much at the core of this chilling piece of fiction. And the women β Sisi, Ama, Joyce and Efe β refuse to characterize themselves as such, no matter how tragic the circumstances that pushed them to choose life as prostitutes. It is this defiance that gives the fierce women their strength as characters, and it is this defiance that makes the many men in the book look even more vile. If the book has one major fault, it is that. The men in the story are so contemptible they come off as stereotypes, all fitting into one of five too-neat categories: weak, cruel, cowardly, vicious and evil.
The story begins after Sisi has been murdered, leaving the other three to sit in the flat they sublet from their callous madam to ponder what happened and why. This leads them to reveal their histories β fragmented, sorrowful memories still tender to the ear, that they packed along with their clothes and girlhood trinkets when they left Lagos for an uncertain future in Europe.
Unigwe was born in Nigeria and lives in Belgium. In this way, the book reads almost like four short stories strung together by a common thread of hardship. If the women made poor choices, they were driven to them by the predatory ways of the men around them.
Ama was repeatedly raped by a man she thought was her father. She learns that he is her stepfather only when he kicks her out. Joyce was forced into a refugee camp in Sudan after the Janjaweed militia β armed Sudanese Arabs who have been at the core of the Sudanese conflict for nearly a decade β killed her family in front of her and then gang-raped her.
