I Didn't Like The Thing Around Your Neck

     As the title indicates, I truly didn't like this book.  I had several problems with it.  First off, the short stories didn't have a good ending.  It seemed that every single story had a random, abrupt ending that didn't bring closure to the story.  If this effect of brief snapshots with abrupt endings was the authors intent, then she did a good job at it but I didn't enjoy it.

     My second problem with the book was the fact that it was short stories.  I don't dislike short stories but this collection didn't do it for me.  They didn't have much of a connection to each other and at times were difficult to follow.  They also weren't very memorable to me as I can only recall one or two of the stories and only a few character names despite having read the book recently.

     Something that I and I think many readers enjoy is a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter that makes the reader hungry for more and encourages the reader to continue reading.  This book lacked cliff hangers that would be answered in the next chapter because the next chapter was a new story with new characters.  This effect made the book difficult to read towards the middle and the end because I wasn't encouraged to read onward.

     Another enjoyable aspect to literature that this book lacked was getting to know the charterers.  At the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, one of my favorite books, I felt that I knew Cheif Bromden, McMurphy, Cheswick, Nurse Ratched, Harding and all the rest of the characters very well. I could relate to them on many levels and this made the novel very enjoyable.  In The Thing Around Your Neck, I wasn't able to relate or get to know any of the characters as they were on a constant ferries wheel of change and weren't written all that memorably to begin with.

     Despite my bashing of this book, I don't think Adichie is a bad author.  In fact, she writes very well in flashes throughout The Thing Around Your Neck.  I think if she expanded on the idea of one of her short stories and made it into a novel that had a coherent beginning, middle and end, with cliff hangers and relatable memorable characters, then she would write a fantastic novel.  I had the opportunity to talk with some of my classmates on the senior retreat about this book and I found my response to the book to be a common response amongst the five or so people I spoke with about the book.