Yinka, Where is Your Huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn is a wonderful book that is so much more than a romance story.  In it we meet Yinka, a British Nigerian woman with an Oxford education, a good career, a solid friend group, and the constant pressure from her family to get married.  When her cousin gets engaged, she sets a personal goal to find a date for the wedding and the reader joins her as she awkwardly meets a few potential dates.  

 

The author captures the insecure inner dialogue so well that it’s easy to be equal parts cringing for and rooting for Yinka.  But this story has more depth than the dating scenes and that’s what made me love it.  Yinka’s friend group is easy to fall in love with, too, and each of those characters are also going through their own situations.  There’s a mom of three young kids questioning the loyalty in her marriage, there’s an aromantic best friend who tries to keep Yinka from changing who she is to attract a man, and there’s work colleagues who morph from surface-level support into deeper-level friends.  Yinka is also surrounded by her Nigerian aunties and feeling their pressures in love and work, save for one auntie who she can speak with vulnerably. 

 

This story is funny and serious at the same time – you’ll laugh with Yinka in one chapter and then yearn to hug her in another as she works through her self-love journey.  If you haven’t read this one yet, I highly recommend it.  

 

Bonus info: did you know that this book originally started as a short blog post by the author?  It grew into this book as the author saw how many women were feeling the pressures of a relationship-obsessed society and she wanted to give a voice to these experiences. 

 

Content warnings: Racism, Body shaming, Colorism, Texturism, Dysphoria, Death of Parent