The Girl With The Louding Voice

This book is all at once uplifting and heartwarming, but at the same time truly so sad and heartbreaking at parts. I absolutely loved it and could not put it down; I read it in just a couple days and when I finished it I could not stop thinking about it. Cannot recommend this one enough! Adunni is a fourteen year old girl growing up in a rural Nigerian village. Her mother died when she was just a girl and she yearns to seek out an education and find her “louding voice.” At the age of fourteen, her father sells her into a marriage (as the third wife of a MUCH older man) for some rice, a TV, and some beans. There, she faces a new set of horrors: the wrath of her husband’s first wife, sex with a man she does not love nor is attracted to, and pressure to bear him a son. When something terrible happens, she runs away and is sold as a servant to a wealthy family in Lagos. Needless to say, she’s terribly treated and beaten there. It feels like things will just not get better and then… she learns of a scholarship at a prestigious school in the city. I’ll say no more as I don’t want to spoil it! As Jenna Bush Hagar said, it will “”break your heart and then put it back together again.” This is a story of courage and surpassing tremendous obstacles; I cannot recommend it enough!