Someday, Maybe is a contemporary fiction novel about Eve as she attempts to work through her grief over the suicide of her husband Quentin. With the help of her family and friends, they help guide Eve, particularly in dealing with her not-so-kind mother-in-law, who blames Eve for her son’s untimely death. To be honest, I had a very difficult time getting into the book. I started it in November, would read a few pages, put it down, repeat until this past week where I was determined to finish it. In the end, I am glad I persevered. About halfway through, there was a twist that led to my engagement and I finished it very quickly. It is definitely a sad read and makes your mind travel down dark roads, but definitely worth a read in my opinion, but beware the slow beginning! Thank you to NetGalley for a digital ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

Deeply sad but also very hopeful and inspirational. A rollercoaster of emotions. If grief was a genre, this book would be right at the top of the list.

The audio narrator for this book is phenomenal. I really loved the first half. It was everything I want in a book: beautiful writing and a great story. It is a story of significant loss, but, like she says, it’s also a story of great love. I thought it would be a five star read for me.

The second half was ok, but it just dragged, kind of a lot of the same thing. Suicide is such a tough topic to sit with. It sat on a time when she was evading people and was stuck. I felt like the book became a little stuck, but maybe that’s just how it feels.

I loved so many passages within the book.

Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli is a beautifully written, soul-baring story of loss, grief, and guilt felt after losing someone to suicide. Eve‘s husband unexpectedly commits suicide, and leaves Eve with no answers as to why. Her grief is primal and absolute; her grief is compounded by the fact that she finds no solace from her mother-in-law. In fact, Aspen, blames her for the tragedy. Eve‘s close-knit and supportive Nigerian family struggle through her utter breakdown and refusal to accept and move on. Eventually, Eve is forced to get back to living when she discovers that she is pregnant, her last connection to her husband. This book is brutal in its depth of sadness and bleakness. Nwabineli‘s writing is sublime and her wit shines through the darkness. But, this is a tough book to get through. It is depressing and it drags. Halfway through, it starts to feel very repetitive and you want to shake Eve to snap her out of it. Yes, there is no timeline on grief and people can’t just move on quickly. I get it, but this is a book…at some point there needs to be some movement or it gets stale. Unfortunately, the story became stale and, almost, annoying. The ending feels very real, and I appreciated that it remained true to the whole novel. And I’m intrigued to read more by Nwabineli. But ultimately, it wasn’t a big hit for me. Beautiful writing, tough topic. Random rating 3/5.

Wow - a powerful & heartbreaking story of the people left behind after a suicide. Eve's husband Quinton took his life without leaving a note and Eve found him. Her life is completely upended with grief and with so many questions. The story walks the reader through her emotions and the love of her family and friends who cared for her during this time. There are ups and downs in her journey, including her contentious relationship with her mother-in-law and losing her job. This was a hard story to read as you feel Eve's overwhelming grief, but it is an honest portrayal with moments of hope. The author ends the book with a reminder for those considering suicide to reach out for help, including suicide prevention numbers.

My thanks to Net Galley and Graydon House for a copy of this e-book.

Eve, a young woman from a Nigerian family living in England, is dealing with debilitating grief after her husband dies by suicide. Despite the heavy topic, there is a lightness to the book that kept me reading and cheering for Eve - aided by the fact that there is a clear person to root against in the book. The backstory of her relationship, her family, and her friends also take away some of the sadness of the topic.

Onyi Nwabineli was not only able to describe Eve's grief, she was able to immerse the reader into it. Through eloquence of her words and writing style she was able to take readers on a journey with the main character. I had to take many breaks while reading this as her words allowed broke free of the pages and shrouded me in an almost suffocating cloud of grief/empathy.

There are many notable quotes within this book as well as moments that made me reflect.

I look forward to hearing more from this author

Suicide entered her life on the last day of the year when her darling husband Quentin Morrow did the unthinkable and killed himself. The trauma of the killing was paralyzing and in the aftermath Eve Ezenwa-Morrow contemplated her role as a wife. Had she been terrible? Or just indifferent? Immediately, her Ezenwa family rushed to comfort, console, and nurture Eve who was both grateful and repelled by their presence. Her life was now a train wreck. She weaponized her grief to keep her family and friends at a distance but over time learned you don’t move through a suicide by burying yourself under the covers.

In "Someday, Maybe" first-time fiction author Onyi Nwabineli courageously takes on the traumatic experience of self-harm, specifically how to survive when your partner purposefully ends his life and you are blindsided. Psychological research has explained the ins and outs of grief, most notably Elizabeth Kubler Ross sensitive detail of grief stages. Modern researchers acknowledge suffering cannot be easily parameterized. Anger for some. Denial for others. Acceptance maybe. But not always. To readers, Nwabineli offers in the prologue a map of the story.

1. He was the great love of my life despite his penchant for going incommunicado,
2. He was as far as I and everyone else could tell, perfectly happy. Which is significant because…
3. On New Year’s Eve, he killed himself
“I found him. Bonus fact: No, I am not okay.”

Universally, that is the legacy of the bereaved. Not being okay. Eve could barely limp out the bed to use the toilet. She subsisted on Zopiclone (for sleep) so she wouldn’t have to remember she was the one who found Quentin bleeding out, his blood upon her brown body a bittersweet agony. How do you move on from that? Through the fog of your tears. By clinging to memories of the past.

Eve was 19 when she met Quentin. “He was gorgeous. Not just gorgeous, beautiful. Almost painfully so. I was rendered speechless by his eyes- the color of an unsullied ocean, the kind you see in travel brochures advertising islands you have never heard of.”

While Quentin was also struck by a visual aesthetic, he noticed Eve on campus and was captivated by her elegant cheekbones and how he imagined they would photograph, her Nigerian ancestry hardly warranted a thought, almost as if it was arbitrary. It was the story’s minor flaw in my view the papering over of interracial love as if it shared exact similarities with same race love. But I understand the author’s choice to frame her story narrowly, so its clarity centered on a wife in despair and in shock.

We get an immediate sense of how Eve and Quentin built a life together for thirteen years. The arc of their marriage was poetic, serene, chaotic and memorable which heightened the freight Eve carried after Quentin’s suicide. Eve worked at a high-brow magazine as an online curator and Quentin was a photographer who escaped a succulently privileged life to be Eve’s partner.

The son of the famous Malcom Morrow and Aspen Bowes-Morrow partnership Quentin once confessed “Eve, I promise you I have no emotional attachment to them.” Children of wealthy parents often do this thing where they skewer where they came from then plop themselves in spaces and zip codes their snobbish parents are revolted by.

At the heart of Nwabineli’s story are two things: coping and Eve’s family. Eve’s soul is crushed, and she manages the onslaught of guilty emotions by taking to her bed. Her family isn’t alienated by her grief and weepiness and lethargy. Her parents are both doctors. Her brother Nate is sweetly caring and older sister Gloria’s bossiness and refusal to tiptoe around Eve’s grief is a perfect illustration of a high achieving British-Nigerian family who through the sheer grit of their will expect to heal Eve. But there is only one way for Eve to manage this horrific and spectacular fall from grace. Be alone. Lick the pus oozing out her wounds. Go to sleep.

Because suicide is a paper cut that becomes a wound that turns into an unhealed scar, authors of grief-fare need a counterbalance to the incurable suffering. Salvation is set aside for something more complex. In the case of Eve and her grief it is a character like Aspen who unleashes a campaign of loathing upon her daughter-in-law. Eve responds by ignoring Aspen’s calls, letting them go into voice mail which enrages Aspen even more and she sic’s her lawyer on Eve with a variety of litigation threats that exponentially intensify once Aspen discovers Eve is pregnant with Quentin’s baby.

The surprise pregnancy and her hovering family are too much; Eve needs an escape. Quentin was scheduled to attend an artist retreat on the Isle of Man and Eve flees there unaware of the consequences of explaining herself. As Quentin’s work is being discussed during an afternoon session, Eve can’t hide her anger-grief and lashes out.

“It’s one thing to hear the sound of my husband’s name in the mouths of strangers-like nails on the battered chalkboard of my heart. But it something else to have your marriage dissected before your very eyes as you sit incognito in the back of a retreat where you have come to try and understand why he is gone.”

If you have ever experienced an epic loss, the pain in this story is retraumatizing, how Eve schlepps sorrow around, dragging it everywhere. A Virginia Woolf quote came to mind while I was empathizing with Eve, the one where Woolf said that nothing has happened until it’s been recorded. It gave me clarity, how Someday, Maybe is a very sterling recording about grief and loss of course, but also how the white-affluent other the brown. How the wealthy lack power over their children’s deaths. This imbalance gives the story its beautiful heft and offers a well needed perspective of what suicide is apart from the myth. And what suicide frankly is not. It is unrecoverable. It is a hellish unfixable hurt. It is not punishment for the damned.

One of the many things I appreciated about how Onyi Nwabineli’s contextualized sorrow was the way she developed grief as a character. Grief was oxygenated in a similar way to Eve. Nwabineli reflected on how the one left behind by suicide is in stasis while her grief balloons around her and continues to grow larger and wider. Even as Eve tackled loss with all the emotions you’d expect from a grieving widow unable to manage the simplest of tasks her recovery was painstaking slow.

Midway through the story, I had the sense that I knew Eve and I credit it once again to the stylistic strategy Nwabineli used to build the story. The anatomy of grief was humanized by the character Eve who was preoccupied by two unanswerable questions. Why did Quentin kill himself? Why did he shut himself off from me? But it was how Eve’s struggle met her resilience that I found the most resonant. Very early in the story there is “with death your suffering is permanent.” The ending is quite the opposite. Touching the wound sporadically. Embracing in the aftermath her new self. Her different life. Her bittersweet memories.

A beautifully written story but very heartbreaking. This was a slow read for me because I really connect when I'm reading and this book was heavy. Eve, whose husband commits suicide is trying to overcome the loss while struggling with if she could have done anything different. 😔

This book is profoundly sad. If you've had any experience with suicide, it can be even more difficult to read. We meet Eve after her husband dies by suicide. Her healing process is messy and difficult, her unable to move past how unexpected his death was. So while she's processing his sudden passing, she's also questioning herself and what she could have done differently to possibly change the course of fate.

It took me awhile to get through this, the pacing is a bit slow but it was well written.

To be honest, this was not my favorite book. It IS well written and at times witty, but reading about a widow coming to grips with her husband’s suicide was rather depressing for me, a widow myself. It might be helpful to others in that situation though.

Such a heartbreaking story. Beautifully written, so much emotional layers. Reading through this and feeling like you are there alongside a journey of grief and the process of healing. Definitely triggering for anyone going through depression, grief or struggling with any form of suicide. Overall I did really enjoy the book but it is a heavy read. Thank you Netgalley.

First, thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for a fair and honest review of "Someday, Maybe."

Second, I absolutely loved this book. Important note: If you're struggling with your mental health, this book might be one you'll need to avoid for a bit. It's heavy, drenched in grief and despair in the aftermath of someone's death by suicide, and by the end, doesn't get noticeably easier-- as makes entire sense for the book itself.

This is a beautifully written exploration of tragedy, of grief, that feels so real for what it is. It explores the timeline, the nonlinear overarching dimension of despair, in the wake of that tragedy. Some parts feel expected near the end of the novel, but it is very successful in what it does despite those moments. This is also a book I couldn't read all in one sitting. It is beautiful but so heavy. I'll read anything by the author again because the way this novel developed, the characters were fleshed out, I am now a big fan!

This is a lovely book.

Read the trigger warnings.

5/5

I like the premise, but upon giving it a try, I find it’s not really my thing, especially thematically.

Book review: Find tenderness, poignancy in this novel about loss
ASHLEY RIGGLESON For The Free Lance–Star

When the publicist contacted me about Onyi Nwabineli’s début novel, “Someday, Maybe,” she said she was sure I would love it. I hesitated. But something about this extraordinary novel stayed with me, and eventually I could not say no. Though this novel was, at times, a difficult read for me, it also stunned me with its precision, its warmth and its wisdom.

“Someday, Maybe” follows a woman named Eve who, to all accounts, has a perfect marriage and a perfect husband. But things change when her husband, Quentin, suddenly dies by suicide, and Eve is thrown into a tailspin. For the rest of the novel, readers are with Eve as she and her family deal with the fall out of this event. Eve’s grief is raw. She cannot wrap her head around the fact that her husband is gone, and her mother-in-law, Aspen, spews poison into her ears. Things becomes even more complicated when Eve discovers she is pregnant with Quentin’s child. She feels unsure about motherhood, even though the baby belongs to her dead husband.

“Someday, Maybe” is an amazing book, but I would be remiss if I did not warn readers dealing with bereavement. Although the writing is beautiful and the characterization spot on, this novel was sometimes excruciating to read. And one might ask why I chose to continue with this novel at all. The answer? Nwabeneli’s novel looks, with tenderness and poignancy, at family, sisterhood, female friendship, and more. All in Eve’s vulnerable and enraged, pitch perfect voice.

I said earlier that this novel is an excruciating read, but in many ways, that is not a bad thing. With a subject matter like this, it was never meant to be easy. And though “Someday, Maybe” is at times a challenging read, it is also real. Nwabineli’s skill is such that, although Eve will almost certainly annoy readers at certain points in the process, you will want to keep reading anyway. This novel also has a beautiful and sweet but unsentimental ending that readers will find well worth the effort.

“Someday, Maybe is as relatable as it is hopeful, and I think that many readers will find something to love in its pages.

This review was originally printed in The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, VA.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for the ARC.

Someday, Maybe is certainly not a light-hearted story. Eve's husband has died by suicide, and she was the one to find him. This book is tough to read at times due to the raw, intense emotions Eve is experiencing. The novel centers around Eve's grief, and her internal struggles as she copes with the loss.

Eve's story is told beautifully and candidly; if you are currently grieving, have recently experienced loss, or struggle with depression, this may not be the book for you.

This one was a STRUGGLE for me to get through. I did not quit reading or only give one star because I did think it was well-written…but the subject matter was just so depressing. I kept hoping for some kind of spark of hope or happiness, but it just wasn’t there. This is a story solely revolving around grief and it is very hard to read. I enjoyed some of the characters (Glo specifically), but that could not redeem it for me. If you want to be immersed in sadness and grief, this is a good one for you. Not something I would have chosen over the holidays especially.

Someday, Maybe broke my heart in two. The grief is real, raw and unfettered. It’s beautifully written, intense, difficult to read and well worth it.

**I received an electronic ARC from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review of this book.

I really enjoyed the writing in this book. Nwabineti is a beautiful writer. Though this was a difficult topic it was a good read. It did take some time as this book is heavy and breaks are needed. At times there is some dark humor which helps lighten the mood. Even though the book is about grief, it was not a tear-jerker. I also enjoyed the Nigerian characters and family. I have enjoyed several books featuring Nigerian individuals in Britain. I would definitely read anything by this author!

I received a copy of this through NetGalley.

An emotional read right from the beginning, Onyi Nwabineli discusses issues of grief, suicide, and racism without the platitudes often given to these topics. While a difficult read at times I appreciated the honesty she gave to how relentless and surprising grief can be. My favorite parts of the book were how she incorporated aspects of Nigerian culture-food, language, and family dynamics- and her individual relationships with each of her family members.