After her husband, the greatest love of her life, commits suicide, a young woman finds the strength to move on with the help of her tight-knit Nigerian family and happy memories of the man she'll never forget.
Eve’s reflections on her journey through grief ring true ... Whether this book affirms your own experience or provides a window to someone else’s, it is a satisfying read and testimony to our human ability to heal.
On the first page we learn that the main character found her husband, Quentin Morrow, who she thought was perfectly happy, after he killed himself on New Year’s Eve ... A lot of expectations come with that shocker of a prologue: high drama, fast pace, mystery ... Dramatic proves to be a great word to describe this novel. Fast-paced and mysterious? Only a touch ... Nwabineli relies heavily on these flashbacks early on, when time moves excruciatingly slowly in an embodiment of fresh, festering grief ... Nwabineli deftly weaves Eve’s Igbo heritage into the story, incorporating phrases, food and traditions ... Then, about halfway through the book, Nwabineli drops a bomb that changes the rules of the game. What had become a lull of spiraling depression gets the jolt that Eve — and the story — needed ... An earnest study on grief that forces you to examine it and not look away. For as long as the anguish is there, we are in Eve’s head experiencing it with her.
... the writing is buoyant, the characters are palpable, the content eschews grief porn. A pregnancy, however, is a known plot device and, in this novel, it feels like one. It accelerates Eve’s ability to evolve without closure, and its visibility calls attention to the book’s mechanics. The stilted dialogue in Eve’s memories, Q’s overlooked 'penchant' for long absences – it’s debatable whether Someday, Maybe’s first-person narration is supposed to sow questions about reliability or absorb weak points in the narrative. Ironically, this debate produces a greater truth if not the novel’s conclusion: what we know about a person is just the story we believe.
