Review

Such a tricky one to review without giving spoilers, and the less you know about the storyline, the more you’ll get out of it.

Without giving too much away, the story follows Efe and Sam from when they meet as teens across the years. The book is rich with themes of love, family, duty - meaning it would be great for a book club pick. It was a very emotional, tense and quite devastating read.

Pick up this book if: you are a fan of One Day, An American Marriage or Americanah.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I don't actually have the words for how good this book is or how much I keep thinking about it. It is an incredible read and I don't want to give anything away so all I will say is please read this book, you owe it to yourself.

This book will destroy you. Sometimes when you read a book, it buries into your soul, makes a small space in your heart, and you know you’ll never forget it. Rootless is without a doubt, one of those books.

Efe and Sam meet in their teens and slowly make their way closer and closer to each other, until they are married with a daughter and their lives are wrapped up in one another. As a teenager Efe is sent by her parents from Ghana to get a British education. In the first pages of the novel we see the difficulties that Efe faces, how unbalanced and alone she feels, away from her family and adjusting to a new life.
She meets Sam through a mutual friend and there is something between them almost instantly. For years, that something stays between them but they are simply friends. Efe struggles again when she goes to university, finding her Economics course impossible but wanting to keep up with it to please her parents. We see her inner turmoil, she wants to make her family proud but she’s cracking under the pressure, a theme which continues throughout the novel. They are both dating other people but begin a love affair. When they both separate from their previous partners, their relationship develops and later they get married. Efe is insistent that she does not want children, making it clear to Sam. He holds out hope that she will change her mind, and even though she is filled with uncertainty and trepidation, when she discovers she is pregnant, Sam manages to convince her to have their baby girl, Olivia. The challenges that Efe has faced throughout her life with her mental health come to forefront again as she battles postpartum depression and remains unsupported at home by Sam, who is working tirelessly for his family. What follows shows how a relationship between two people who love each other deeply can fracture, fall apart, and yet still hold hope for a future.

I loved the description of Ghanian culture and of Ghana and the impact of family and friendships on Sam and Efe’s life, mostly a force for good but smothering at other times.

Rootless dragged me into a vortex and would not let me out until I finished it. It is incredibly written, flipping from one time to the next, always counting down with the ‘five years before’ or ‘three months before’ leaving the reader wondering ‘before what?’ This question is only answered at the end and it left me reeling.

I will recommend this book to anyone who will listen to me and I will be thinking about it forever. Krystle Zara Appiah is incredibly talented, I have never read a debut that deeply impacted me in the way that Rootless did and I will read anything she writes. If I could give it ten stars I would.

Thank you HarperCollins UK and NetGalley for this eARC.


My review will also be on my GoodReads account https://www.goodreads.com/ev_books closer to publication.