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    Where Women Are Kings: A Novel

    Where Women Are Kings: A Novel

    by Christie Watson


    eBook

    (Digital original)
    $11.99
    $11.99

    Customer Reviews

      ISBN-13: 9781590517109
    • Publisher: Other Press, LLC
    • Publication date: 04/28/2015
    • Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
    • Format: eBook
    • Pages: 265
    • File size: 2 MB

    Christie Watson is a British novelist and pediatric nurse. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she won the Malcolm Bradbury Memorial Bursary, and has since published short fiction and other writings in numerous publications including Wasafiri, Mslexia, Index on CensorshipThe Guardian, and The Telegraph. Watson teaches creative writing at various institutions including Birkbeck University, the Groucho Club, and Cambridge University. She has won the Costa First Novel Award and Waverton Good Read Award for her first novel, Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away, and was named one of Red’s Hot Women of the Year in 2012. She lives in London.
     

    Read an Excerpt

    Elijah, my lovely son, my beloved,
                
    I want to tell you your life. Everyone has a story inside them, which begins before they are born, and yours is a bigger story than most will ever know. They say I shouldn’t tell you some things, and that words can hurt little ears, but, son of mine, there are no secrets between a mother and son. A child has seen the insides of its mother’s body, and who can know a secret bigger than that? And they say a lot of things, those English. What they call ‘child abuse’, us Nigerians call ‘training’. So don’t mind them.
                
    Your story begins in Nigeria, which is a place like Heaven. There is continuous sunshine and everyone smiles and takes care of each other. Nigerian children work hard at school, have perfect manners, look after their parents and respect the elderly. Nigeria is brightness and stars, and earth like the skin on your cheeks: brown-red, soft and warm.
                
    I am full up with proud memories from Nigeria. Most of all I remember my family. Mummy – your grandmother – was famous for shining cooking pots and shining stories. ‘Long ago,’ she would tell me and my sisters, ‘a woman, so full of empty, sold her body as if it was nothing but meat for sale at the market. She travelled all over Nigeria, that woman, looking for something to fill up her insides, and learnt many languages, searching for words to explain the emptiness.

    Reading Group Guide

    1. Where are women kings? What role do Nigeria and Nigerian customs play in the novel? Which do you think determined the relationship between Elijah and Deborah more, their Nigerian heritage or her mental illness?

    2. On page 208 Deborah notices that the police officer she’s speaking to “had a small cross around her neck,” which makes her believe she can trust her. Elijah refers to Nikki’s freckles as “angels’ kisses” (see p 116), as signs that she is being protected and cannot be hurt by the wizard. Elijah also believes that “to be safe, all he [has] to do [is] find a Nigerian who believed in God” (p 72). What is the importance of signs in how Elijah and Deborah navigate their world?  Do Nikki and Obi believe in signs? What do they use to navigate their world?

    3. Emptiness is a recurring motif throughout the novel. (See pp 4–6, 79, 173, 211, 237.) What is the relationship between emptiness and immigration? Between emptiness and motherhood? When Elijah isn’t feeling empty, what is he filled up with?

    4. Elijah and Deborah both express a certainty that they contain “badness” (“Elijah knew he was bad,” p 29; “I felt as if he could see into my bad heart…I felt badness all the way through me, Elijah, right to my core,” p 147). How does each react to the “badness” in them? What makes each of them feel this “badness”?

    5. What different forms of belief are there in Where Women Are Kings? What role do they play in the novel?

    6. Compare Deborah’s religious community with the social service community in which Elijah is placed. Does the novel seem to endorse one over the other?

    7. Deborah and Elijah often feel isolated (“The most important thing is that you tell nobody,” p 158; “Elijah was alone with the wizard,” p 172). Is their isolation only personal, or is it systemic—something that exists in the environments they inhabit? Where does each find communion and community? What works against isolation in the novel?

    8. Describe the conflict Elijah feels when he’s confronted by the idea that “the wizard” is a “myth” (p 220) and the reality of his birth mother’s love for him. Does the novel resolve this conflict? How?

    9. Are there any similarities between Deborah’s and Nikki’s experiences of motherhood?

    10. Describe your reaction to the ending of the novel. Were you surprised, saddened? Do you think it is a fitting ending?

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     From the award-winning author of Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away, the story of a young boy who believes two things: that his Nigerian birth mother loves him like the world has never known love, and that he is a wizard
     
    Elijah, seven years old, is covered in scars and has a history of disruptive behavior. Taken away from his birth mother, a Nigerian immigrant in England, Elijah is moved from one foster parent to the next before finding a home with Nikki and her husband, Obi.
     
    Nikki believes that she and Obi are strong enough to accept Elijah’s difficulties—and that being white will not affect her ability to raise a black son. They care deeply for Elijah and, in spite of his demons, he begins to settle into this loving family. But as Nikki and Obi learn more about their child’s tragic past, they face challenges that threaten to rock the fragile peace they’ve established, challenges that could prove disastrous.

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