Masquerade

I was drawn to Masquerade by a brief description: Hades and Persephone set in fifteenth century West Africa. As with so many good books, once I got into the novel, I found there was so much more to it than that. On the surface, it is a retelling of the myth, but it is its own story, filled with rich details and fascinating characters. Òdòdó is not merely a captured girl; she is a young woman suddenly thrust from the edges of society to the heights of royalty. Sàngótè, the city to which she is brought, is not the underworld but a capital full of life and wealth and danger.

Her desire is not so simple as to escape and to return to her mother. It becomes both more complicated and simpler than that as more time goes on and she becomes more enmeshed in politics and treachery. She wishes to survive.

This is O.O. Sangoyomi’s first novel, and I hope it is the first of many. She has a knack for drawing readers into the immediacy of a story, and for creating complex characters which feel at once deeply human and intensely mythic.