"Whoa-oh here she comes. Watch out boy she'll chew you up. Whoa-oh here she comes. She's a Maneater!"

This novel is so clean you can catch a whiff of Korede's bleach rising from its pages. It is so clean, in fact, the premise and storyline cut across each chapter quickly, never pausing for very much commentary. The relationships are provocative, the protagonist's throughline tracks neatly, but the content is limited by her binary thinking. This may have been the point (which is interesting) but by choosing a spartan prose style the text isn't given enough heft to compensate. Braithwaite's central questions do not feel very profound. The result is a novel that feels like a very good pilot episode of a larger television series and not a complete and satisfying story.

By the way, if this were a forthcoming series on, say, HBO instead of, say, Lovecraft Country, I would be very excited about it.