Score: 5/5 Bookmarks

Can I give The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré more than five stars out of five? How can a book that broke my heart so completely also leave me so hopeful?

Our star, Adunni is a fourteen-year-old girl in Nigeria. Her beloved mother dies, and her father wants to sell her off to pay his debts. Marriage is the last thing on her mind, she wants more, she wants an education and a better life, but doesn’t know how to make it happen.

Adunni ends up running away from her village and her new husband under traumatic circumstances (I won’t give any spoilers, you’ll have to read it for yourself) and ends up essentially being sold as a maid to a wealthy couple in the city.

Time and time again Adunni bears horrible injustice and inhumane treatment but never gives up. Her strength and will and belief in herself are beyond inspiring. Thank you to the author for letting us come along on this journey. To get to watch Adunni grow each day as she obtains more knowledge, experience and seeks out information for herself was humbling. It broke my heart to read about her struggles, but now I have a little more space for the light to get in, so for that, I’m grateful.

Definitely read this one if you haven’t already. You can listen to it as an audiobook (wonderfully narrated by Adjoa Andoh) here. Or get the physical copy by clicking the button below. 

Synopsis:

A powerful, emotional debut novel told in the unforgettable voice of a young Nigerian woman who is trapped in a life of servitude but determined to fight for her dreams and choose her own future.

Adunni is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who knows what she wants: an education. This, her mother has told her, is the only way to get a “louding voice”—the ability to speak for herself and decide her own future. But instead, Adunni's father sells her to be the third wife of a local man who is eager for her to bear him a son and heir.

When Adunni runs away to the city, hoping to make a better life, she finds that the only other option before her is servitude to a wealthy family. As a yielding daughter, a subservient wife, and a powerless slave, Adunni is told, by words and deeds, that she is nothing.

But while misfortunes might muffle her voice for a time, they cannot mute it. And when she realizes that she must stand up not only for herself, but for other girls, for the ones who came before her and were lost, and for the next girls, who will inevitably follow; she finds the resolve to speak, however she can—in a whisper, in song, in broken English—until she is heard.