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A review by gbatts
The Gold Diggers by Sue Nyathi
3.0
This one is tough to rate.
I love the name and I think it perfectly captures what the novel is trying to achieve. Both in derogatory nickname given to women who are trying to improve their station in life, and literal gold diggers who flocked to the colonial world on gamble to make their fortune.
Starting the novel, it reads like torture porn. Then reading the author’s intro, it’s clear she made those choices to shock sympathy into the reader. This meant the book read like a Cosmo long read on the horrendous things that can happen to undocumented migrants.
To me, the book was strongest in the fourth part, where many of the characters had been stripped away and we were left with a more realised narrative of the remaining characters. It was here we started to get a better sense of Jo’burg as a city as well, it’s geography, it’s politics and its culture.
I love the name and I think it perfectly captures what the novel is trying to achieve. Both in derogatory nickname given to women who are trying to improve their station in life, and literal gold diggers who flocked to the colonial world on gamble to make their fortune.
Starting the novel, it reads like torture porn. Then reading the author’s intro, it’s clear she made those choices to shock sympathy into the reader. This meant the book read like a Cosmo long read on the horrendous things that can happen to undocumented migrants.
To me, the book was strongest in the fourth part, where many of the characters had been stripped away and we were left with a more realised narrative of the remaining characters. It was here we started to get a better sense of Jo’burg as a city as well, it’s geography, it’s politics and its culture.