Wishful Exuberance

For anyone who had read Chinua Achebe's "Things fall apart" and then "No longer at ease" or the likes, Wishful Exuberance could not have been a better metamorphosis and evolution. Emmy is a priceless beautiful African child and grew up in the typical but rather rapidly changing African society. Traditional societal values are not completely eroded yet. Then wait. Moral values founded on culture and religion joined together to transform this very handsome, intelligent, sexy and sometimes radical boy into a powerful modulated epitome who while he basked in the euphoria of rarity and exceptional phenotypic endowments went on to resist the lure and controversy of fleshy desires while treading on doggedly with colossal achievements.

The book tells us the waking and sleeping, seasons and the fun they bring, the youthful thinking which is sometimes selfish and the growing up of an ambitious African school boy as his physical and emotional conflicts battle to find inspiration that could take him further to realise his great dreams while still overcoming jealousy, enmity and the stresses of inter-family competition. His father had same struggles. It was now his turn in a different setting. He knew it. He was determined.

Many aspects of the story keep the reader in suspense and leave you with the irresistible curiosity and urge to get it done with. In this story Emeka Madu captures the heart beat and inner recesses of the mind of a growing youth in a typical village setting that adores its good age long traditions and culture which is the pivot of societal life and which is increasingly been eroded by the nascent impinging moral decadence and western culture. It leaves the younger reader thinking he or she is or would be like Emmy and the older reader thinking he or she was in the same shoes as Emmy.