"Your schooling is your voice, child. It will be speaking for you even if you didn't open your mouth to talk. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come."

A 14-year-old girl from a small village in Nigeria battles arranged plural marriage and modern slavery on her unrelenting quest to obtain an education.

You know those stories where your heart is left so full, where all you want to do is wrap up the heroine in a hug while you both blither and cry, when you know you will think about her and the mark she left on your soul for the rest of your life? And then she opens her mouth and says something so startlingly innocent and real, and you start laughing because somehow, someway, miraculously, her spirit isn't broken despite everything she's had to endure? And it makes you love her even more? That is my relationship with Adunni.

This book is a treasure. Written in broken English and narrated with a thick accent, I had to slow the audiobook down in the beginning until I got into the flow of the writing. Which was fine with me. I'm one of those who feel something is missing when an international story is narrated in a generic North American accent so appreciated the authenticity.

This is not a light read. Daré's rich and evocative debut tackles a bevy of issues. From child and forced plural marriage to repetitive instinces of abuse to human trafficking and servitude to female oppression to the inherent prejudices of classism and the access to freedom and options education provides, Daré was as fearless as Adunni in chronicling the intricacies of survival when basically everything is used as a tool of oppression.

Yet after all the tough topics she dove into, the tenderness with which she told this tale has made Daré a must-read author for me.