Conjure Women by Afia Atakora book Review

Conjure Women by Afia Atakora book Review 

Conjure women by Afia Atakora this is a historical fiction book and you are following two timelines in this book. 

The first one is set during slavery time, or during-- right before the civil war takes place and kind of through part of the civil war. 

And then there is the timeline of freedom time, which takes place about like five to ten years after the civil war has finished. 

In the slavery time timeline, you are following-- or you're mainly following a character named miss may belle who is basically a healer on a plantation. 

She's obviously a slave herself, and so her duty on the plantation is to take care of the other slaves, 

Whether it be you know healing them, providing them with like various medicinal needs, or like being a midwife and helping with the birth of various children. 

She herself has a daughter named rue and you also follow a little bit of things from rue's point of view as well. 

And then the freedom time timeline is told through the perspective of rue. 

And she has basically taken over her mother's duties for all of these different black people who were formerly slaves at the same plantation. 

There's also kind of like a what people say is the third main character. To me she felt like a minor character but she's very much intertwined with these two main characters. 

That is varina who is the master's daughter. And varina and rue are basically the same age. Obviously rue doesn't know her exact age but everyone like on the plantation basically knows their age based on how old varina was when they were born. 

And so they were born pretty close in time and so they've spent a lot of time together. Like they've played together and things like that. 

And so their fates and lives become very intertwined over the course of their lives for various reasons. 

So this is a really interesting book and I overall really enjoyed my experience with this story. 

I will say like I'm not gonna provide any more sort of like plot information because I found that like the plot to be the weakest part of this book. 

Which feels kind of like a weird thing to say about a book but it feels very apt. Like going through plot details feels like focusing on the wrong part of this book.

Like this is very much a book that focuses on characters and character development and having these sort of dual timelines exposes you to how different people, 

Especially rue at the center of it all but also other people who were slaves on the same plantation, how different events have occurred over the course of their life and kind of like how things have evolved amongst this community of people. 

Like I felt like everything related to the plot of the story to be pretty average or predictable. 

Like there are certain things that in the beginning of the story are hinted at as being sort of like secrets that people are keeping and things along those lines.

And when all of those sort of secrets are revealed or like truths are revealed over the course of this book, I never found any of it to be particularly surprising. 

And so if you're someone who like really focuses on plots of books when you are reading them, then you probably won't enjoy your experience with this book because I didn't find, again, anything about the plot to be particularly exciting. 

If anything the most like interesting sort of plot elements all take place during the freedom time aspect of the book if only because personally 

I don't read a lot of books about that like time period right after the civil war when black people are trying to figure out what they're going to do next. 

And also just like surrounding the specific circumstances that happen to their masters family and stuff like that and kind of how all of that is playing out is kind of interesting. 

But overall like the plot itself isn't necessarily the focus of this book. The center of the story seems to revolve around the fact that like rue has become this healer woman amongst this community, taking up after her own mother. 

But when she starts to go through all of that, or at the point when this book takes place, there is a child who is born with like really dark black eyes and like sort of scales on its skin and things along those lines, and a lot of people around town take that child as being sort of like a bad omen almost. 

And as certain things occur over the course of this book, a lot of people start to blame both rue and this child for being kind of like a curse upon their town or suspecting rue of doing sort of like bad witchcraft or curses and things along those lines. 

And you see sort of like how the tides change in attitude towards rue and towards the work that she's been doing. 

And so even though like the plot is not super exciting or like mind-blowing in that way, if you enjoy sort of like quiet character-driven stuff, then I think that you'll enjoy this book because that's really what I enjoyed about this book. 

Like I found the writing to be really immersive. Like I feel like I completely sank into this story. And I found like the characters themselves to be really interesting because they all fall into that sort of like morally gray ground. 

I wanted to kind of see like what was going on with rue and like the choices that she made, both as a child, I found to just be like intriguing. 

I didn't necessarily agree with them but I found them intriguing and I wanted to see how she was gonna handle all these situations moving forward. 

Miss may belle is a really fascinating character, following like her life and sort of like the limited perspective that you get into her life and then sort of like the eventual reveals that happen.

It's really, really fascinating. Obviously like this is a story that takes place during the times of slavery and so there are some scenes in here that are kind of hard to read. 

Nothing in here is like gratuitously violent or s*xual or anything like that but you're dealing with slavery so there's going to be some difficult scenes in here. To me

Like the discussion around like faith and beliefs and things like that were really, really fascinating in here especially because it starts to talk about kind of like people finding beliefs in different areas. 

So as people are starting to turn on rue a little bit is around the same time that another character comes into play who is a christian preacher and things like that and sort of seeing how people adjust their focus and kind of like how rue views all of this and things like that I found to be really, really fascinating. 

I'll also quickly say that I found the ending to be like a little bit disappointing. I wasn't crazy about the choices that were made at the end of the book, which obviously I'm not going to talk about in deep detail because, 

You know, spoilers and whatnot. Like it would completely give away some points of the book. 

But even like in the fact that I found the plot to be relatively predictable I was very surprised by the choices that were made at the end of the book. 

So if you've read this book, talk with me about it down in the comment section below because I want to talk to other people about the endings and the choices that were made. 

So yeah, I mean overall I enjoyed this book a lot while I was like in the moment of reading it. But kind of reflecting back on it I could see that it felt like just a little bit underdeveloped in terms of plot. 

I think if you are again someone who doesn't mind weaker plots but enjoys character driven stories, then you might enjoy this book. 

But overall for me this is probably like a three-and-a-half-star book. I put it as a four star book on goodreads but it's probably closer to three and a half stars. 

But overall I enjoyed this and I would definitely like keep my eye out for more books by this author. So those are my quick thoughts on conjure women. 

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