The Madams is a well told story with Thandi, the narrator pulling the reader along to experience life as she and her friends know it. We are drawn into their world of Hawaiian cocktails,American blokes, Indian hunks, philandering husbands, ungrateful maids, indirect offsprings of the Royal family… and we can't help but tag along; and happily too. The writer laces her fiction with traditional lingo which just few of our Nigerian writers do effectively. There's also a lot of reference to traditional cultural values/beliefs, without coming off as anti-21st Century. The language is very simple and the narrative is detailed and explicit. This makes the book 'unputdownable'. The Madams is loaded with humour, wit and sarcasm and yet creates a world so real to the reader that at the end you come out looking at your world with new eyes.
The novel explores among other themes, the theme of racism in a class society set in post-apartheid South Africa; sex and sexuality within and outside the confines of marriage and socially acceptable norms; as well as the inexplicable strength and beauty of friendship and sisterhood. The Madams intentionally or otherwise, exposes the fact that 21st Century liberalism and equality between man and woman in Africa is almost unattainable in reality.
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