A review by breannajanay
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

In FRESHWATER, Emezi’s account of Ada’s growing up is haunting. It’s the kind of apparition that sticks to the corners of your periphery, taunting and goading, before finally deciding to reveal itself on its own terms. It’s yet another work that explores hedonistic responses to the discovery of self amidst unspeakable trauma. 
 
FRESHWATER is Ada’s coming-of-age story, documenting her life from when she was an unruly baby to a force nature. As she ages, so do the godlike forces in the marble recesses of her mind, billowing in and out of identity and form. The flux causes confusion, and rash behavior, and it reveals the lengths Ada and the gods she carries are willing to go to recover her own power and her own place. 
 
Emezi explores the question: how does one find oneself, and how does one find help on that journey, in a world where no one fully understands your complexity? How do you live in a world where you constantly feel “away”? The actions, almost ritualistic, that Ada takes steep a certain kind of anxiety that lingers at a very low level and spikes at times outside of your control. And perhaps that is on purpose so that we can feel exactly as Ada does. Only, unlike Ada, we do not step backward so that gods can step forward into our place. We witness Ada partake in a beautiful yet wicked dance of self-salvaging, self-indulgence, but most importantly self-defense. This is a story of discovery, and it is a story of desperate survival. 
 
There are many trigger warnings that come with this book, and it’s because of that that I’d give this book a four out of five stars. This book is not written to be immediately understood by everyone. Witchy isn’t an appropriate enough word to describe it. It’s a deeply spiritual unraveling of one’s sense of self when the self has been transgressed in the cruelest way possible. 
 
It’s a question of -- how we recover a fractured sense of being when, from the start, the foundations were already so fragile? 
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