Review of Kalayla

[Areesha Ahmed]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Kalayla" by Jeannie Nicholas.]

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3 out of 4 stars

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Kalayla is a beautiful story that is entwined with three lives with an age gap. Lena 73 years old businesswoman who regrets how her life has been at her young age, how her children turn into what Joey want them to. Her husband Joey is not the man she thought, he abuses her and she married him because of the family business to tie and grow. Her husband is dead and she don’t know how her sons are doing. Maureen 30 years old artist who married a black boy named Jamal and her Irish family disowned her because of that. Now that Jamal is dead, she moved out of the apartment with her daughter Kalayla and live in Lena's building and across from her. Kalayla 11 years old, a feisty, is a smart-mouthed girl who doesn’t need anybody to show her what she is. She has no friends and hates birthdays. What gives her shock is that her mother lied to her and Kalayla doesn’t know how to deal with it. But She is Kalayla who figures out everything. And she knows she is bi-racial.

I love how Jeannie Nicholas put every issue in one book, marital abuse, motherhood, love, Race, Sexuality. These issues push me to read the book till the end. The way the author used the words, the words I fell in love with, the portrait of feelings of three different people of different ages is amazing and it’s impressive to read. I cried on some pages and smile when Kalayla replies with her smart-mouth. And how three of the characters open up to the people and the cover appeals to me the most, the butterfly with colours. And Kalayla's part is the best.

At some places, the book caught a slow pace and gets boring, it has too many descriptions about Lena's feelings, at some point, the description is needed but at some point, it’s pointless to describe more and more and at the stage, readers get that what she is feeling.

Overall, I rate Kalayla 3 out of 4 stars, I took one star because of the above-mentioned problem. I was in a dilemma to give it 4 stars or 3 stars but I’ll stick to 3. I didn’t find any mistakes, so the book is professionally edited.

I would like to recommend this book to more mature teenagers and adults. It’s worth the time to sit and feel what it is like to be a child, a mother and an old woman at the same time.

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Kalayla
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