A decent read, but all around not something that I will remember long term. I felt a decent amount of build up and I was hoping for a stronger ending, but it fell flat for me.

“Patience is a subtle thief. It’s a thief of time and a thief of money. See this country? People have been patient for democracy. Patient for change. All their patience will eventually steal their hope. They say fraud, and they say 419 when they speak of what I do, but the government is really the biggest fraud”.

The relevance of this quote seeps within this story. Set in the 1990s in Nigeria, a story of a girl seeking her purpose while searching for a mother who left when she was a child. With a wicked stepmother, a father consumed by greed, and a stepsister who loves her unconditionally, Patience has rebellion sitting at her fingertips and leaves home to attend university. Patience is not my ideal character. She is naive and gullible and I almost forgot how childlike she really is. Sheltered and seeking independence is no easy tasks but what Patience finds is no true happy ending.

Of wealth and yet not wealthy at all. What one defines as rich may be present in different forms. Patience slowly detours away from college with a dream to return to America to find her mother. “Wasn’t it so— to be American born meant problems were misunderstandings? Hardship to the American born, a foreign concept?” But with doing so, she encounters a group of friends who are seeking a financial freedom that will alter their lives forever. Though money seems to fix all, their is an election at hand and one character , Mayowa symbolizes hope as his belief in doing what’s right and voting in a rightful president will change the dynamics of their lives and will give men like Chike (Patience’s boyfriend) a job he is deserving of after graduating university and yet his current occupation is an Okada driver.

The dynamics between patience and Chike bothered me. How long do we beg a man to fully commit before you call it quits? Granted, Patience fell in love with him as if she’s been dehydrated for years and finally got a drop of water. Chikes character changes and his development shocked me but what do you do when change does not come?

“Poverty can be like a mental disease that affects people in two ways: either you succumb to it for the rest of your life or you spend your days searching for ways to be rid of it. And for those lucky enough to escape poverty, there can be an obsession to never return there”.

Patience shows us what’s it like to seek independence and how everyone who smiles in your face is not friendly. How greed can change and how putting your faith in something does not mean the outcome will be in your favor. In fact, if so, the sacrifices may not be worth it in the end.

I love a book that takes place in a different country that has me Googling cultural references left and right. Bonus points if those references include food or music. This novel provided a rich description of Nigeria, both in suburban and urban areas as well as spanning economic statuses. Through the various characters' lives, I learned what youth of varying levels of wealth or poverty, educational backgrounds, and family connections could expect. All of their prospects were vastly different so that even without the interpersonal drama, this novel would have been rich in material. However, it is the interpersonal part that actually read a bit one dimensional and forced at times. Particularly at the end, I felt a strong response to the abruptness, and then to the attempt to make it make sense within the larger picture.

I really enjoyed this book. It is no wonder it got a starred review at Kirkus! I would say that this novel is a lot more than a coming-of-age story, it has multilayered characters and plot. I really appreciated the use of Nigerian pidgin in this novel. It is hard to find novels that use a different language within the story unapologetically.

Totally recommend it!

To be honest, I didn’t love this book and just thought it was ok. The story dragged for me and I found myself losing interest in the characters and the story.

First-generation American Abi Ishola-Ayodeji’s new novel, Patience Is a Subtle Thief introduces readers to modern-day Nigeria’s wealth and poverty while telling Patience Adewale’s story.

Born in the United States to Nigerian university students, Patience hasn’t seen or heard from her mother for many years. After leaving the U.S., the family has lived in Ibadan although her mother has been replaced by a step-mother, who arrived with Patience’s half-sister. Ishola-Ayodeji opens the novel with a party celebrating the appointment of Patience’s father, the multimillionaire Kolade Adewale, to commissioner of finance. Patience has never felt loved by her father, who threw her mother out of the house years earlier and has told Patience only that her mother went mad and returned to the U.S. Patience, herself, appears to feel ties to her birth country as she makes efforts to sound like an American.

When “Aunty Lola,” Patience’s mother’s best friend, attends the party, the friend tells Patience she has information about her mother that can only be told when Patience visits her home in Lagos after moving there for university.

Once in Lagos, Patience first visits her cousin Kashimawo. Although she doesn’t know it yet, “Kash” and his friend Emeke are involved with petty crimes but eager to join a larger operation they feel will set them up financially. They want to draw in Emeke’s brother Chike, an engineering graduate, who hasn’t been able to find an engineering job and struggles financially, driving an okada (a motorcycle cab). Perhaps, they will draw in a woman.

After Chike drives Patience to her mother’s wealthy friend’s home, Patience is more determined than ever to find her mother. First, however, she must come up with the passport and money for a trip to the U.S.

A prize-winning journalist and film producer, Ishola-Ayodeji has several impressive credits to her name, including a PBS video on the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and a four-part series on issues facing contemporary Nigeria and Ghana. In Patience Is a Subtle Thief, she moves from reporting fact to creating fiction but logically grounds her debut novel in social issues Nigeria faces today, showing how circumstances can drive well-meaning people to make wrong decisions.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperVia for an advance reader copy.

This book is an interesting book, I will give it that. Patience is a complex character who does quite a bit of growing up throughout the entirety of the plot. I enjoyed the discussions of wanting something so badly you feel like you must make specific choices. It is a book about wanting being more than principals and desperation leading you down paths you didn't think you'd go down. There is no winning often in the game of life. I also think the Ishola-Ayodeji did a spectacular job looking at the way people view young adults and how, in some worlds, keeping them in the dark is often seen as protecting them. There is a danger to that, and the author knows how to write about it. Overall, the book was a fun, interesting read. It isn't spectacular, but well worth a read.

I loved the plot of this book. Patience and Chike's struggle for identity and independence was engaging. Nigeria in the 90's isn't a place that I know that much about and I was fascinated by the political history and cultural differences. There's so much nuance in the difference between my experience as an American college student in the late 2000's compared to Patience's experience in a country eager to retain tradition and striving for change. However, I think my ability to grasp some of those nuances was hindered by the writing style. The prose is stilted and the speech is full of slang that I didn't understand and had no context for. That being said, I think it's an excellent addition to the library of anyone looking for more BIPOC work in their personal libraries.

I think there was a lot of good plot points in the book, but I had a really hard time getting into the book because of some of the writing. Not the plot itself, but the ways in which the accents of the speakers were written. I don't understand the reasoning behind trying to make the writing show an accent. What was the purpose of giving some of the characters an accent in writing, yet not the protagonist? Would they not have a similar accent since they are from the same place of birth? This was the biggest issue I had with the book. Overall, I think it has an interesting plot, but I was heavily put off by the way that the author tried to write out an accent. It reminds me of the ways in which they would write out the transcripts for former slaves, like Sojourner Truth, who became public speakers after they were emancipated. It also made the book a bit difficult to get through.

i so wanted to love this book as it is historical fiction set in nigeria during the 1990s, a time period and place i had not really learned about until reading chimananda ngozi adiche's books. however, i think a combination of a dislike for patience, the main character, and the stilted, almost too-formal/impersonal reporter-y writing style made me like this book less. i am glad i read it, but patience's self-pity and her selfishness were just too much at times. i really did feel for her as she suffered from both mother and father wounds and really just needed to go to therapy. but she was so NAIVE and that bothered the heck out of me! i wish more could have been said on her class privilege and how she dismissed everyone else's problems as not valid because no one could understand how terrible her mother's 10 year absence was. maybe i'm being too harsh on her, and i'm really trying to be validating of this trauma because it is painful and i can't imagine being in her shoes, but she was so single mindedly obesssed with her mother and so so so naive about the way the world worked (that part wasn't her fault but the part that was her fault was that she wasn't even bothering to change her worldview!!). towards the end i was more intrigued by the political plot, and i liked the storyline about oga because i thought that was interesting. but i could not get over patience. and i think overall that i wish this book discussed the abiola political coup more as well as digging into the issues of being poor and having to do illegal schemes to survive issue more because it still felt superficial, at the end -- chike died abruptly and then patience just went to new york and found her mom and it's not a happy ending but it's neat and wraps up and i feel like it was incongruous to the rest of the story. i think i just wanted MORE from this story and i didn't get it, so i'm not fully satisfied having read it and definitely am annoyed at patience. however, i am glad i had the opportunity to read this! so thank you for the privilege of reading this book.

I didn't know what to expect going into this book. At first, I thought it was going to be a simple coming of age story but it's so much more than that. This is truly a heartbreaking story about a girl making choices that reflect the lack of love and acceptance she's always wanted in her life. I really enjoyed the story and getting to know Patience as a character. I think Ishola-Ayodeji did a wonderful job of writing Patience and it was nice to see her story unravel in a way that was intertwined in the plot without just saying it outright. There is a list of shady characters who you will also feel betrayed by and you do find yourself rooting for the protagonist to get her life on the right track. I think if you can handle a book where the protagonist is down on their luck and just wants to do right, then you will enjoy this story.