Book #38 for 2024: In the Ditch by Buchi Emecheta
In the Ditch by Buchi Emecheta
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A gritty story set in a suburban London council estate.
Adah has moved to London from Nigeria; she is trying to bring up her five children in the "Pussy Cat Mansions", a squalid housing block. Tenants are neglected by landlords and authorities, and she even faces harassment from neighbours. In one of the early chapters, a man shows up at the door, claiming he's not a racist but her kids are too loud.
Adah is forced to quit her job, and so ends up living on the dole while trying to be a mother at the same time, while constantly trying to find her way out of the "ditch", the building where she is living.
It is quite easy to recognise the message that this book gives about the struggles faced by people living in poverty, and some implied commentary on racial equality too. At one point when Adah looks for alternative housing, she finds herself being offered the worst imaginable places to live, including sharing a house with an old lady who owns "a dog as big as an elephant".
I thought this was a really good book; not a lot happened, apart from Adah's attempts to improve her life, but the narrative really immersed me in the situation with its depiction of the living conditions and the misery of having to stand in a dole line. There were a few references to the Biafran war in Nigeria, which made me glad that I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun".
I was also glad that after all that, there was an uplifting ending.
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