The List by Yomi Adegoke - Review

 

I bought this book on a whim off Vinted alongside some other ones - I think I got five books for about £13, which was good. I love Vinted for books! They're so cheap! 

I am glad I took a chance on this and I am glad it exists as a book, but I'm not really sure it worked for me. That's fine, not all books are for all people. But I found it a bit of a slog and I would have liked it to end a little bit earlier than it did. 

So Ola is the heroine of the book. At the very beginning, she is less than a month from marrying her fiance, Michael. They are both somewhat famous, and are totally #couplegoals and Black aspiration. Ola is a journalist at a feminist magazine. Michael has just been hired by CuRated but up until now he's been a successful podcaster. He's been hired by CuRated because they've been called out for being so white and he's their diversity hire to prove that they're not racist. Similarly, Ola is "the Black one" in the magazine office, and her friend Kiran is "the Asian one" and Sophie is "the gay one". Ola seems to think that this is just the way life has to be for her to get ahead.

Anyway, on the morning of Michael's first day at CuRated, Ola wakes up to her best friends Ruth and Celie messaging her about a thing called The List. This is an open document which has named abusers and rapists in UK media, like a Me Too kind of thing. And Michael is on the list. It says that he is guilty of harassment (so not like the worst offences on the list, but even so) and that he has a restraining order against him. This is news to Ola and she obviously doesn't know what to do. 

She wants to believe Michael when he says he's innocent, but she is also a feminist and wants to believe women. Her editor Frankie asks her to write about The List for the magazine, but Ola clearly doesn't want to do that and is desperate to get the focus off herself at work. 

Now I think it's just really stupid that she just doesn't postpone the wedding until they decide what to do, but Ola keeps giving excuse after excuse. She wants Michael to prove that he didn't harass anyone but how do you prove a negative? She sets a private investigator on to him. 

Meanwhile, Michael is certain that he knows who is behind the accusations, and he is sure they aren't exactly true. He is really misogynistic though and as I read in someone else's review on Goodreads, I wish that he had undone his views just a little bit. For instance, near the end of the book there's a bit where he admits to himself that the number of people that Ola has slept with is too high for him, even though it's below his own 'colossal' number. Two of his friends are proper dicks, too, and he is complicit in their sexism a lot of the time and never calls them out. The fourth friend realllly needed better friends. I won't say that I disliked Michael's parts of the book, but he did annoy me. 

Ola, too, kept seeming to make stupid decisions and not for reasons that I could understand. There didn't seem to be enough good things about Michael to keep her coming back, and they had had their issues at the beginning of the relationship. I liked her relationships with her friends. 

I don't want to give spoilers so I won't say much more, but I did think the end was just a bit stupid. In all I'm giving this three and a half out of five.