Little Rot
There’s an art to depicting things going seriously wrong very quickly, and Akwaeke Emezi’s latest novel, Little Rot, is a masterwork of the form ... Mesmerizing ... What gives Little Rot its vitality are its overlapping love stories, its characters’ longing, their acts of devotion and tenderness in defiance of a world in which a soft heart is a liability ... It’s a testament to how complete a sense of contamination Emezi creates in the rest of the novel, particularly in the stomach-turning and dramatically perfect final twist that drags even the reader into complicity. We come away troubled, unsettled — and in some subtle way changed.
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Holding it all together is a plot that ducks and dives with cinematic verve ... Little Rot isn’t a perfect novel – Aima, for instance, blurs as a character, and cynicism snubs some of its deeper questions – but it bears out those words of warning with unflinching dedication.
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Resists easy categorization. It has the dark twists and pace of a thriller, the ambitious scope of literary fiction, the language of poetry and the yearning of romance ... For all its merits, veers toward cynicism.
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