A review by lepasseportlitteraire
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

emotional funny lighthearted relaxing fast-paced

3.75

This is my first Akaeke Emezi book and probably won’t be my last. If you have been here with me for a while, you know I am not the biggest romance reader. 

However, Akaeke Emezi managed to give me what I have been looking for for a long time: a realist romance book.

Do not get me wrong, the premises of the book and the plot are not realistic AT ALL: it is not every day that you meet a rich guy who immediately falls for you and not only proposes a free luxurious vacation but also the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expose your artwork and advance your career. So, before you all come at me, let’s agree the plot is not realistic. However, while the plot is extra (and I am here for it by the way), I did find realistic aspects that I was looking for in other elements of the book like the characters, especially the main character and her messy grief and approach to relationships.

Is the main character perfect? No, far from it. Does her best friend enable her? Yes. Was I still rooting for her? Absolutely. I think a lot of people, including me, found ourselves in situations where we had misplaced feelings for someone we should not, and attempted to control them, to redirect them, and ended up hurting people in the process of trying to do so. I found that relatable, which made up for the absurdity of the plot. 

I would describe this as an enjoyable hot-girl summer read for sure, but nothing more. However, I am curious to read other of their work, as they published several books and explored very different genres (I am thinking about PET in particular, which has been everywhere on bookstagram and booktok)