MY PARENTS' MARRIAGE

A couple navigates marital troubles.

The first novel for adults from author Brew-Hammond, set in the early 1970s, opens with 22-year-old Kokui Nuga celebrating the Christmas holiday at a hotel in Accra, Ghana. It is there that a server first catches her eye; when she comes back on New Year’s Eve, the two talk, and he introduces himself as Boris Van der Puye, who will soon head to the U.S. to attend a community college in Buffalo, New York. Despite the fact that his days in Ghana are coming to an end, the two date and fall in love, and Kokui also applies, and is accepted to, the school. Kokui’s father, Mawuli, isn’t thrilled with her decision; he wants his daughter to stay and work for his thriving paper company, but Kokui resists: “Leaving her father’s haunted house of disrespected women was the only plan she was clear on.” Her mother, a victim of Mawuli’s frequent philandering who has since moved to Togo, also urges caution, but Kokui and Boris marry and move to the U.S., first staying with Boris’ cousin in Brooklyn, then moving to Buffalo for school. When things start to unravel and Kokui returns to Ghana after her father’s death, she starts to wonder whether she made a mistake, telling her mother that she feels “trapped by him. Like, if I push for something I need or tell him how I truly feel or show him who I truly am, I will spoil everything between us. And he lies, Ma.” Brew-Hammond’s prose and dialogue are workmanlike, but this tale of a garden-variety couple ultimately feels thin.

Brew-Hammond is talented, but there’s just not much here.