This book presented the Nigerian house servant's story through an interesting journey of literacy, nationality, and sexuality. The relationship between the three girls, Mary, Belinda, and Amma, was created really well and the friendships they had with each other was touching and sweet. The comments about the mix of Nigerian slang being confusing is similar to how i felt at the beginning of the book. However, as the story progressed, even if i didn't understand it, helped build up the identity and emotions of the scenes that are happening.

I really wanted to like this book but after attempting to get through it a couple of times, I have decided to DNF it. The main reason being the portrayal of Mary, Belinda, Okay basically all the Ghanaians. The broken English and sort of simple mindedness of the characters didn’t sit well with me especially given the time period in which the story is set. I just found it harsh and implausible. I was curious about Amma’s story and looked forward to keeping up with Belinda in London but in the end, I just have to accept that this story isn’t for me.
Thanks to the publishers for the ARC and I apologize for taking long to leave my review.

Overall I was a bit disappointed in this book. I found the dialogue stilted and unbelievable at times, and I think the plot was really lacking. But I liked reading about Belinda's relationship with the lovely Mary, and her experiences in London.

A wonderful insight into Ghanian life through the eyes of a young girl. For full review go to https://joebloggshere.tumblr.com/post/178510967681/hold-by-michael-donkor-also-known-as-housegirl

WOW. What a debut book. Beautifully written, you've hooked straight away. It is set in both London and Ghana. Go and read it. Not only is the cover beautiful but the book itself is truly wonderful.

Thank you, NetGalley Nd Harper Collins UK for giving me the opportunity to read ’Hold’ in exchange for my unbiased and honest review.

A very polite African girl who works as a companion to a young girl is whisked away to London to be the sensible companion to a young miss there instead. So she enters a new and confusing world.

Struggled to get into this but when I did I really enjoyed it. Donkor is a fantastic writer injecting humour and great insight into this story.

I have tried to approach this book at least 3 times. I have also failed to finish it at every attempt. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't make it through.

I didn’t really enjoy this book not sure why but did not find it captivating. Unfortunately I gave up before finishing.

The prologue opens at the funeral of an unidentified person, lodging a question in the back of the reader’s mind as the events of earlier that year (2002) unfold in the rest of the book.

Belinda and Mary are housegirls in the home of a wealthy Ghanaians couple who, following custom, the girls refer to as ‘Aunty’ and ‘Uncle’. (Personally, I would have liked more background about the role and employment/legal status of housegirls in Ghanaian society to help me understand better the relationship.) Belinda and Mary indulge in gentle, good-humoured bickering as they prepare and serve food to their exacting ‘Aunty’ and ‘Uncle’ alongside other daily household duties such as cleaning, laundry and shopping. Mary, in particular, has a quirky sense of humour and an optimistic outlook on life while Belinda, a few years Mary’s senior, is conscious of her role as advisor and guide.

Soon, the two girls are separated when Belinda is sent to London to befriend Amma, the daughter of another rich Ghanaian couple, Mrs and Mrs Otuo. Belinda’s arrival into the confusion of the airport is conveyed in an impressionistic way. ‘A gentle voice came down in a different language. Then another. And then another. […] Strip lighting overhead, black arrows on yellow, corridors with moving floors. […] Queuing. Strip lighting overhead, black arrows on yellow, corridors with moving floors. […] The beeping. The thing to do next: reach the gathering at the tracks that went in a big loop. Stooped older women stood behind concerned men. Bored toddlers harassed teddies’ limbs. Lots of tutting at watches, followed by sighing when suitcases came through the lazy mouth.’ Admit it; you’re there with Belinda at the purgatory that is Baggage Reclaim.

On the journey to her new home, Belinda wonders at the unfamiliar sights of London. ‘…London was one big black road with cars. The motorway gradually thinned out into smaller roads, where there were stores selling rows of plastic bodies – some naked, some clothed – frozen in the middle of dances.’

The author takes the reader through the trajectory of the two girls’ relationship from Amma’s initial suspicion of Belinda’s motives, expressed through a sullen refusal to communicate – ‘…the idea of a visitor itched at her. No privacy. Someone watching, asking questions. Someone else to think about.’ – to Belinda’s gradual breaking down of the emotional barriers Amma has erected, guided by Mary’s sage advice in their periodic funny, chatty phone calls. ‘My sister, if one is a quiet, you have to find clever tricks for to stop them being as that. Sneak into her to make her chat properly.’

In fact, soon the roles seem to be reversed as Amma becomes a support to Belinda as she struggles to cope with inner demons of her own. These promising developments are swiftly halted when a revelation by Amma conflicts with everything Belinda has been taught about right and wrong. Soon after, a tragic event sees Belinda return to Ghana and in the final section of the book the story picks up the narrative from the prologue.

The book is liberally sprinkled with Ghanaian dialect words that had me making frequent use of the glossary. Conversations are rendered in a distinctive style that I’m aware some reviewers of West African heritage have criticised as inauthentic. I’m in no position to judge but I would say that, authentic or not, it did give me a clear sense that I was reading about characters whose background and ethnicity is different to my own. On that subject, I did enjoy learning about Ghanaian culture: clothing, hairstyles, social customs, entertainment, commerce and food.

Hold is a character-driven story about female friendship, exploring your own identity – cultural, sexual, social – and finding a direction in life.

I was interested by the plot of this book, and reading the experiences of someone moving from Ghana to London.

While the characters were interesting, I don’t think the author went into enough detail about the cultural differences and how Belinda actually felt which meant the story was very slow and not much really happened. Although the story is split between Belinda and Amma, the girl she has come over to help, there are far more chapters on Belinda.

An interesting story, but doesn’t give enough of an insight into what it is like to move from one country to another very different one.

I didn't enjoy this book for several reasons. I disliked the main character and found some of her opinions distasteful. Furthermore, I wasn't sure what the author was intending to convey by giving his character such opinions then seemingly never addressing them. This was also the case with the character of Amma's mother and her transphobic rant. I also did not care for the author's treatment of Amma. The resolution of her story was far from satisfactory and seemed at odds with the character. The complex and compelling Amma and her struggle with her sexuality was one of the more enjoyable aspects of the story and I felt aggrieved that the last we know of her the author has decided to send her on a date with a boy!

I did enjoy the idiosyncratic speech patterns of Belinda and Mary which were beautifully written.

Belinda knows her place in the world, when her father cannot pay for her anymore, her mother sends her away to work in the household of people she calls Aunt and Uncle in accordance with Ghanaian customs. She is not the only maid there, also 11-year-old Mary works for them and quickly becomes something like a sister Belinda never had. When Belinda is sent to England to take care of Amma, a girl her own age, the two have to part which isn’t easy for either of them. Yet, they manage to stay in contact over the thousands of kilometres that now separate them. Mary wants to know everything about Belinda’s posh life in London, but the older sister cannot tell everything that she experiences in England. Her role is different now which is hard to get used to and people behave in a different way. She misses her home town, but also sees the chance that she is given since she can go back to school and study. When a tragic incident calls her back to Africa, Belinda realises that only a couple of months were enough to change her completely.

Michael Donkor was born in England to a Ghanaian household and trained as an English teacher and completed a Master’s in Creative Writing. He was selected as a “New Face in Fiction” by The Observer in January 2018. “Hold” is his debut novel in which also autobiographical elements can be found even though his protagonist is female and he has lived all his life in the UK.

What I liked about the novel were the different perspectives on life that you get and the difficulties that living between different cultures can mean for you personally but also for the people around you. First of all, I hardly know anything about Ghana so the beginning of the novel when we meet Mary and Belinda, young girls who work full time as maids, gives a short glance at what life in other parts of the world might be. They were not treated especially bad, quite the contrary, but the fact that the lack of money in their family leads to giving up education is something which is far away from our world in Europe.

Most interesting also Belinda’s arrival in London and her awareness of being different. She has brown skin, but this is different from the Asian brown of the Indians or the skin of the girls from Jamaica. It is those slight differences that are of course seen by the members of those groups at the margin but often neglected by the majority society. Even though she shares the same cultural background with Amma, the two girls could hardly be more distinct. The most obvious is their sexual orientation where Belinda sticks to a romantic understanding of love and where Amma has her coming-out as homosexual. Belinda can easily adapt to a lot of things, but this clearly transgresses a line that she will not cross. The girls’ friendship is nothing that comes easy for both of them, but it splendid how Donkor developed it throughout the novel.

Without a doubt, Michael Donkor is a great new voice among the British writers who themselves have made the experience of belonging - but not completely, of being trapped between cultures and having to find their identity while growing up.

Belinda is a teenage Ghanaian village girl, sold by her mother into bonded labour as a servant girl in a big house. The owners of that house, Aunty and Uncle, then sell Belinda on to a Ghanaian family living in London to be a good influence on their wayward daughter Amma.

The issues presented in the novel are real, but the characters are not particularly strong. Belinda in particular is an Everyman character, bland and compliant; not terribly happy but not terribly persuasive that she had any real emotion at all. I confess that I gave up at a third of the way through when I was having trouble telling any of the characters apart or telling where one party stopped and another started. There was no development, no progression and no sign of an actual story. All this made harder by a liberal sprinkling of Twi idioms (yes there is a glossary).

There were some fairly generic Ghana-London comparisons - for example between the tiny houses of the London middle class contrasted with the vast houses in Ghana; and the pressure in Ghana of social appearances. There is the earnestness and hard work of Ghanaians to make the most of meagre resources contrasted with the frivolity of Londoners squandering their advantages. But this is not really adding much to our knowledge of the world.

Mostly, the novel was just boring.

And I know some reviewers have said the novel improves after the first third, but after investing time in getting to that point and having got so little in return, it seemed sensible to cut my losses.

I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Fourth Estate, and the author Michael Donkor.
This book follows Belinda, a teenager from Ghana who makes the difficult journey from house girl in Kumasi to companion in London in the early 2000s.
I struggled to become involved in this story, the reading experience often felt disjointed, and the writing style confusing.
As a South Londoner, I enjoyed all the references to Brixton, Herne Hill, and the surrounding areas I know so well, and Donkor's descriptions of both Ghana and London were vivid.
However, the lack of any major events or suspense in this novel, and an unsatisfactory conclusion, meant that it fell a little flat for me, and so it was hard to maintain interest and keep reading.
Overall, just not a book for me.

Funny, moving and sad, Michael's novel is a beautiful coming of age story. My only disappointment was the lack of closure with so many of the characters.

A really interesting and well told story with wonderful writing. I found myself thinking about it when I was reading it and raced pack to pick it up. Donkor created a powerful story.

A beautiful story set in London and Ghana about growing up and dealing with differences in culture. Beautiful descriptions and engaging characters.

A coming of age story, set between Ghana and London, this is the story of Belinda, a housegirl, who moves to London to help the daughter of her employers friends. Amma (the friends daughter) has become withdrawn and is struggling with something in her life - not her studies though, she's a straight A student. She won't talk to her parents about it, and to begin with, it doesn't look as though she'll talk to Belinda either. Their friendship builds over a period of weeks and months. In this time, Belinda goes back to school in order to gain some qualifications. She seems to feel guilty of having left her fellow housegirl, who she refers to as sister (even though the 12 year old Mary is not her sister by blood, they have bonded over being in the same circumstances of separation from their families at young ages).
This novel explores African attitudes towards sexuality, family and responsibility. It's funny at times, but also incredibly moving. I really enjoyed it. We can see the contrast between life in a Ghanaian city and village, and the difference again between those places and London. A fascinating novel.
many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy of this wonderful book.

I liked the idea of this book but in reality, I found it a really slow read.

Initially Belinda is in Ghana working as a house girl with Mary, a younger girl, who is in training. You learn a bit about their friendship and their daily routines. But then, Belinda is sent to London where a family is hoping that she will be a good influence on their daughter Amma. The rest of the story follows what happens as Belinda gets used to living and studying in London. There are obviously vast cultural differences but I felt these were alluded to rather than explored in detail. The friendship with Mary continues, but becomes a more distant one with phone calls being less frequent.

Most of the book is about the lives of the two teenagers in London. The blurb says that Belinda finds London 'bewildering', actually I thought she settled in easily and coped with the transition really well. It's an OK read, but I don't think the story will stay with me or be a long term favourite.