Letters to God (Book Review)

You will hardly ever find a book that tells a story raw like bleeding flesh the way “Letters To God” did it, it is a rare experience. I felt like I owned the story, like I was a part of it and I could almost smell the stupidity of Musa mixed with the lucidity of Mr. Idemili from a mile; something I’ve not felt in years from reading an experience from the printed or unprinted pages of a book.

Letters to God takes the feel of reading a story away from the contemporary ordinary experience of just reading to an experiential level of becoming a part of the story. With or without intent, Femi was able to infuse the natural feel that gave me as a reader a role in the story to the level that I had opinions, suggestions, reactions and interaction with specific characters at different points in the story.

Femi selected specific elements that are the crust of an everyday family system and fused it with an unimaginable dilemma that guarantees an unprecedented experience at every scene. Unlike a regular story that fixated on one character, every character in this story has a unique role that can be isolated and substantiated without loosing the bite of the whole intriguing experience in this very unique letters to God.

Although the story is totally realistic and almost unbelievable, the dexterity of Femi in composition and delivery of the components of this letter is totally unbelievable, it was like the account of a spy who saw it all happen from the inside.

To understand the creation of “Letters to God”, Femi adopted an ethnographic methodology that gives every reader a role as the story unfolds, unconsciously allowing each reader adopt an exciting character in the story or create a new identity for themselves. Like a great anthropologist, he infused the simple and complex family challenges common to every Nigerian home and plugged it all into one single letter to God. Perhaps this “Letters To God” is not only a figment of Femi’s imagination, I’m suspecting (and I might be right) Mr. Idemili is Fragile’s uncle.

Taking “Letters to God” too seriously might however lead you into believing that the Nigerian Police is extremely inefficient considering the details of the reopening of the case, or how a kidnapper was presented as a witness in court instead of in custody for kidnapping a toddler he assumed was his own son; a son the mother conceived in her father’s house and not in her husband’s house where he worked as a guard. Regrettably an unrevised portion of the story (my assumption) or perhaps, an intentional blunder designed to arouse questions and engage even the more.

Above and beyond, if I were God… Mrs. Idemili will be somewhere in prison for misleading the court on emotional grounds, Musa will be somewhere in the male section and the legitimate Osas will be alive. A great read for me I must agree.

I’m Abidemi Babaolowo Oderinlo
I Write What I Like