Yinka, Where is Your Huzband? By Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

 

Reviewed by Christy

            Yinka is an Oxford-educated woman with a good job and good friends. She is also extremely close with her family. By most measures, she is well rounded and successful. But her Nigerian mother and aunties are still waiting for thirty-something Yinka to settle down and start a family. They won’t be satisfied until she finds a huzband, even going so far as to pray over her singledom at her younger sister’s baby shower. Much to Yinka’s mortification.

            Yinka, Where is Your Huzband? is the story of Yinka coming into her own, despite her family’s expectations and some major bumps along the way. I found Yinka to be charming and relatable. She is messy and frequently unsure of herself, and I think most people on Earth can relate to that at some point in their lives. However, this was probably only a three and half star read for me. The pacing drags quite a bit in the middle, which was a struggle. I also found Yinka’s cousins and friends to be overly harsh on her. (The elder women in the family I can understand because they are a different generation but I found her contemporaries to be almost as inflexible.) There’s a moment when Yinka stands up to a snippy cousin which I thought was honestly deserved but her friends felt it was deeply unwarranted and chastised her for it. The text treats them as correct in this thinking.

            However, the last third or so really bumped up the rating for me. Yinka struggles with some serious self-loathing (it doesn’t escape her that so many eligible black men end up with light-skinned black women. One suitor even tells her to her face he doesn’t like dark-skinned women). It gets very heavy but I think it’s important for naïve, white readers like myself to understand what black women go through. But there is also a lot of joy to be found in this book. Yinka’s budding confidence is super fun to witness, and it gives the vibe of old school rom-coms (without that much rom.) Yinka’s growth throughout the book is very satisfying, and I wouldn’t mind seeing a movie adaptation sometime in the future. Despite its shortcomings, there is a lot of good here, and I’m glad I read it.