Name: My Sister, the Serial Killer
Genre: Fiction
Author: Oyinkan Braithwaite
Publisher: Narrative Landscape Press Ltd.
Year: 2018
Pages: 227
ISBN: 978-978-55723-5-3
Reviewer: Zainab Muhammad Anka
My Sister the Serial Killer is a book that explores the realms of life, deceit and death; Shows the uncertainty of togetherness and how much power our thoughts have over us. How our subconscious minds can decide what we’ll mull over and what we’ll act upon. It’s a story of how a young girl named Ayoola finds an unexplainable joy in killing people. Her targeted victims are men whom she usually has relationship with. It’s clear that she first lures them into submission, commits them to her and does the unthinkable.
Her elder sister Korede does all she could to lay low of whatever the heck makes her kill people. Whichever sounds instructs her if there’s any. She wants answers about why she kills and what she wants from it. What drives her thoughts toward it and if, there’s any justifiable reason of her doing. It’s unbelievably terrifying for Korede to bear the shock of having to live with a killer in the same roof. She dates men. Kills them. Moves on and acts as though she doesn’t carry the can of anything. It’s becoming her routine. She does it many times and they labelled her a serial killer. Her sister doesn’t feel any urge of exposing her. Ayoola starts killing when she was seventeen, her first victim is a man named Somto, Korede remembers how she met Ayoola at the scene, set the corpse on fire and fly. Though, she warns and questions her repeatedly, it doesn’t in anyway, show her interest in making her publicly guilty of what she does.
There are so many things about pain. Whether it’s existential, emotional or psychological, Ayoola and her sister experience a pain that comes from the abstinence of their father in their lives. This will not be a sure power reason behind her killing but it can have its share in giving her more ton of weird thoughts that her mind couldn’t necessarily contain. It contributes so much to her hatred for men. She has never had a female victim, that’s a way to give it a second thought.
Korede’s fear gets high when Ayoola shows up on her working place and doesn’t leave until, she decorates her image in Tade’s heart. A doctor and one of Korede’s co-worker who, she admires and loves secretly. The first moment he talks to her about her sister (Ayoola) she couldn’t help but picture him dwindling in the pool of his own blood. She doesn’t want him dead, bygone and forgotten just like Femi. Who Ayoola killed despite his love for her and how he seemed to catch her heart with his poetic arrows. Ayoola is beautiful and dangerous, this has been the reason why Korede keeps her working place unknown to her mother and her sister.
Korede nearly puts herself in jeopardy when she makes confession about her sister’s killing to a patient (Mukhtar Yautai) who’s being drifted to coma for long. This probably shows how much Korede has consumed and how her whole is in desperate need to spit it out. She talks in his presence. She thought her saying will go unheard of. She never thinks he’ll hear. This goes on and on. Korede does all she could to do away with Ayoola’s thought from Tade’s mind; she doesn’t want him to think she’s being sarcastic with him about her sister, or worse, jealous. It goes this way until one day, Ayoola shows up on her working place again, this time, she doesn’t leave without getting numbers exchanged. Tade automatically becomes her next target.
Things worsen when Ayoola met Gboyega. A rich businessman who isn’t stingy with his riches. He doesn’t hesitate to take her on a lavish trip to Dubai. His last trip. She declares to her sister that; he dies of food poisoning and the news reports a story of Gboyega who dies of drug overdose in Dubai. Korede is befuddled. She thought Ayoola’s method of killing is with knife but how confident is she that she only uses a knife? That’s not where the puzzlement lies, but how she manages to get away with all the murders.
The book is awesome in many ways. You’ll figure how we will sometime be our own problems. How if we have don’t play our cards with caution, we will end up being becoming entitled to our mistakes, misfortunes and sadism. How the tiny ailments we once overlook in ourselves can have the power to reproduce into more twisted problems; Creating more uncalled thoughts of ‘I’m awesome and the rest of all of you sucks, so I deserve a special lifestyle. Or ‘I suck and the rest of all of you are awesome, so I deserve a special lifestyle. All in all, of these are what deceive our minds and make us exercise some acts of abomination; the sense that we are uniquely special or defective in someway not everyone else is.
Short Bio
Zainab Muhammad Anka is a Nigerian. She is a writer and a spoken word artist who breathes between the pages of books. She appreciates nature but afraid of the idea of existence.