The novel is based in many of the realities of the writer's life, but the prose is infused with imaginative lyricism and tone. In the end, this coming-of-age novel also has one foot on the other side, held between the open gates — a young woman of many nations and many souls. The journey undertaken in the novel is swirling and vivid, vicious and painful, and rendered by Emezi in shards as sharp and glittering as those with which Ada cuts her forearms and thighs, in blood offering to Asughara ... Emezi’s lyrical writing, her alliterative and symmetrical prose, explores the deep questions of otherness, of a single heart and soul hovering between, the gates open, fighting for peace.
...[a] witchy, electrifying story of danger and compulsion ... Ms. Emezi has wholly reshaped and reinvigorated the painful spectacle by imagining it from the perspective of the trickster gods who possess her ... Its conclusion is as striking and mysterious as the ways of the gods who narrate it. In recent years, books like Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen and Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay With Me have found new angles of perception for familiar stories of love and grief. Ms. Emezi’s debut is the latest standout in this exciting boom in the Nigerian novel.
In all the ways that the story of Freshwater is extraordinary, the ordinary moments—of love, of small cruelties, and of traumas—also emerge, resounding ... What it does...is show that the truth exists in multiple forms. There is not, nor can there be, solely one. And within this truth, somewhere, exists Emezi’s. Filled with beautiful, lush sentences, through Freshwater, Emezi offers us a lens into their world and creates a stunning landscape in the process. The novel explores the trauma of a life as worthy of being seen, and we should all be grateful for this contribution.
...[a] remarkable and daring debut novel ... Freshwater is a poetic and disturbing depiction of mental illness as it haunts the protagonist from birth to adulthood ... This novel expands the universe of mental illness to include women of color and other ethnicities. Rooting Ada’s story in Igbo cosmology forces us to further question our paradigm for what causes mental illness and how it manifests. It causes us to question science and reason.
Igbo spirituality, Emezi radically suggests, has as much to offer as any of these schemas when it comes to decrypting human folly or transcendence. Ada’s story involves depression, loneliness, and the seductions of self-harm. The book would have made grim sense through a mental-health lens; instead, it is an indigenous fairy tale ... Freshwater is alive to the tension between the affirmation of owning a single identity and the freedom and mutability of being multiple.
...[a] harrowing yet beautiful novel ... Freshwater is the kind of novel that deserves, no, demands immersion and focus. Every sentence left me reeling, every paragraph on the edge of my seat, and every chapter begging for more. I could’ve spent hundreds of pages more in Emezi’s lush creation ... For a debut novelist, Akwaeke Emezi has successfully pulled off what many longtime writers only dream of doing. It’s an astonishing, haunting, stunning piece of work. I hate how good it is and I love that I had the opportunity to read it.
Freshwater, ultimately, is not a book about giving in to one’s demons, but about living with them ... Emezi’s voice is enormously playful, playing with the rhythms of sentences and the conflicting and contrasting voices in Ada’s head. Most striking of all is the 'we' voice of the ogbanje, which skitters frenetically across the page, all id and godlike grandeur: It’s just alien enough to sound like a foreign presence in a human being’s head, but human enough that its resonances linger. Beyond all her verbal pyrotechnics, Emezi’s ability to literalize the experience of a fragmented identity is astonishing: It’s affecting without venturing into pathos, and hopeful without becoming saccharine. And she’s just getting started. One of the most exciting things about this book is imagining what Emezi will bring us next.
...a haunting yet stunning exploration of mental illness grounded in traditional Nigerian spirituality ... Employing precise and poetic yet accessible prose, Emezi brilliantly crafts distinct voices for each of Ada’s selves and puts them in conversation with each other ... Freshwater is a brutally beautiful rumination on consciousness and belief and a refreshing contribution to our literary landscape.
It’s a brilliant beginning, in the tradition of the classical bildungsroman but extending the form into something more capacious, as if Emezi were pushing with all her might against the walls of a small room and succeeding in making it larger ... Freshwater reimagines the genre of psychological self-portrait. Ada suffers the slings and arrows of mental torture more than the average protagonist ... The execution and style of the book are so very accomplished that one cannot help but wish for a more ambitious ending, a foray into the fantastical. Instead, the book stays strictly with Ada, never leaving the confines of her life.
These voices in Freshwater - the chorus of personalities - should feel familiar to anyone who spends a lot of time lost in books. What is reading, but inviting another voice to take up residence in your head? Emezi’s voice is hypnotic and powerful and imaginative, leaving the reader unsure of what in the story is real and what is not. Freshwater at times feels a little too unmoored from reality. Some scenes lack a sense of place or a narrative thrust. In those parts of the book, the reader is left floating in a sea of language which sounds pretty, but which doesn’t seem to be actively describing anything. But then something vivid and clear happens - Asughara turns the tables on another domineering man with her unbridled sexuality, say - and Emezi’s prose calls the reader to attention. Freshwater embeds you deep into Ada’s mind, demanding that you feel what this young woman feels, that you see the world the way she does. It is not an easy experience; it’s a story of trauma and violence and heartbreak. But it’s also a story of survival and strength and of coming to terms with what it means to survive.
...harrowing yet beautiful ... As Emezi peels back Ada’s layers, she exposes the culture clash between Indigenous beliefs and Western colonialism ... Deciding if Ada’s story is reality or imagination—or if Freshwater itself plays more toward fantasy or fiction—misses the point. The whole book is liminal space upon liminal space, a threshold between the past and the future, truth and lies. The narrative is as non-traditional as it is non-linear; Emezi and Ada are not beholden to Western rules and systems ... At 226 pages, I should’ve been able to breeze through Freshwater in an afternoon, two if I was feeling lazy. Instead, it took me nearly a week of consuming it in small portions. Racing through it felt disrespectful ... For a debut novelist, Akwaeke Emezi has successfully pulled off what many longtime writers only dream of doing. It’s an astonishing, haunting, stunning piece of work.
Emezi offers a perspective on mental illness that refuses categorization and diagnoses. Rather than characterizing Ada’s behaviors—her insatiable sexual appetite after being raped, her self-mutilation, alcoholism, and an eating disorder—as coping mechanisms or symptoms of mental illness, Emezi attributes them to conflicts between our spiritual and physical selves. She also refuses to portray the spirits that lead Ada to acts like self-harm as entirely malevolent. As she makes clear, Asughara and the other ?gbanje love Ada, and exist to protect her. With her brilliant novel, Emezi shows how the different aspects of our personality are often in conflict, and how that conflict can be inescapable.
Akwaeke Emezi’s bewitching and heart-rending Freshwater is a coming-of-age novel like no other ... Whereas many works of magical realism gradually weave otherworldly elements into familiar reality, Emezi reverses this process. Magic is the base reality, and the reader is plunged at once into a murky liminal space of blood, smoke and snakes ... For all its sheer invention, Freshwater feels more like an interpretive journey through uncharted territory with an experienced guide. Potent and moving, knowing and strange, this is a powerful and irresistibly unsettling debut.
...this courageous and inventive novel challenges Western assumptions about identity ... It’s refreshing how Emezi approaches a story of fractured national and racial identity quite differently from recent books that deal with similar themes ... Less convincing is that fact that the novel doesn’t deal with morally complicated aspects of the Nigerian culture that Ada eventually identifies and reconnects with ... despite these reservations, the impassioned point of view and inventive writing in Freshwater is something worth celebrating.
...an engrossing tale of identity, mental illness and spirituality ... If it sounds like there’s a lot going on in this novel, there is, but Emezi’s careful structuring and poetic language provides a pleasing balance to keep us stabilized as we reach toward higher planes. Reading Freshwater, then, is akin to letting oneself over to a luminous experience; we are enveloped fully from page one, and leave the novel feeling transformed.
To enter Emezi’s world, you not only need to decolonize your mind, but also free yourself from patriarchal and binary ways of viewing the world ... The great trick of this novel is that we want not only peace for Ada, but also for the troubled spirits inhabiting, and one with, her. Reading Emezi’s unfolding integration of fictional forms and modes of thinking—spiritual, analytical, historical, cultural, clinical—you feel like you are witnessing a talented and emotionally astute writer finding her voice(s). Freshwater is a dazzling, problematic debut that promises so much more.
...remarkable ... The novel begins with the first-person collective voice; 'We' introduce Ada and map her trajectory from childhood in Nigeria through to her time in college ... In the sections of Freshwater narrated with this technique, the voice is poetic, often incantatory ... a fitting culmination for the extraordinary journey Freshwater charts.
The destigmatization of mental illness has become a focus in popular entertainment circles, particularly the YA space, and the bracing Freshwater takes that effort several steps further. Brilliantly, it reconfigures Western conceptions of identity, trauma, and even consciousness by discarding Western approaches to character.
...a riveting and peculiar variation on coming of age ... The poetics of Emezi's prose enhance the mythology she evokes. As enchanting as it is unsettling, Freshwater tickles all six senses. The chorus of voices narrating Ada's life achieves a remarkable balance between cruel machinations of cavalier deities and deep empathy for the distressed vessel they inhabit ... dazzling.
Though some readers may find the correlation between mental illness and the ogbanje limiting, others will view this as a poetic and potent depiction of mental illness. Emezi’s talent is undeniable. She brilliantly depicts the conflict raging in the 'marble room' of Ada’s psyche, resulting in an impressive debut.
