"Seventeen-year-old Abike Johnson is the favourite child of her wealthy father. She lives in a sprawling mansion in Lagos, protected by armed guards and ferried everywhere in a huge black jeep.A world away from Abike's mansion, in the city's slums, lives an eighteen-year-old hawker struggling to make sense of the world. His family lost everything after his father's death and now he sells ice cream at the side of the road to support his mother and sister.
When Abike buys ice cream from the hawker one afternoon, they strike up a tentative and unlikely romance. But as they grow closer, revelations from the past threaten their relationship and both Abike and the hawker must decide where their loyalties lie."
Spider King’s Daughter is about parallel worlds colliding. Abike is headed for Yale University in the Fall. Runner G is happy if he sells two thousand Naira worth of ice cream in one day. Abike lives like royalty in a Lagos palace: well-manicured gardens adorned with bronze statues, pools, and fountains. Runner G wades through garbage to get to his crumbling Mile 12 flat that he shares with a sister and a depressed mother. Abike’s house is an impenetrable fortress. Runner G sleeps to the sound of gunshots coming from neighbouring flats being raided by armed robbers. But in a city with a population density of about 20, 000 people per square kilometer, it’s very easy for incomparably different lives to crash into one another. That’s exactly what happens one hot summer day. Bored to death during a chauffeured ride from school, Abike breaks her rules and rolls down the window of a her air-conditioned car to buy ice cream from a boy she’ll thereafter refer to as “my hawker.” There’ll be more ice creams bought. Then a date, followed by a few more dates but just when things seem so rosy, a dark and troubling past will come calling and put everything they’ve ever held dear to the test.
I love that the story starts out as your usual boy meets girl romance. You’re taken in by the chemistry between the two love birds but just when you’re getting used to the warmth and fuzziness of a traditional love story, things begin to get dark and never stop until the shocker of an ending that sends you reeling.
What I really love is the quirky details Onuzo uses to draw a compelling picture of life on the streets of Lagos. I’ve seen hawkers from the safe distance of a comfy car or through the broken window of a bus, but I’d never have guessed what it was like to be one. Thanks to Onuzo, I have a sense of the financial logic behind hawking, what the profit margins are, how the pecking order works, and what it feels like running after cars and putting up with abusive and impatient customers.
It’s refreshing when novelists play with form, no matter how subtle. The story is set up in such a way that the reader gets a first-person account of events from both Abike and Runner G. It’s fascinating to see how both characters narrate the same events differently, the kinds of details they choose to see or not see, include or keep out, perhaps, because while one is looking from above the other sees things from down below.
Age Rating I would say could be 12+. Interesting social dynamics but no swearing or anything untoward.
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