Good-for-Nothing-Girl

by Sefi Atta

Genres: Fiction

184 pages, Hardcover

Published November 26, 2024

About the author

Sefi Atta was born 1964 in Lagos, Nigeria. She was educated there, in England and the United States. Her father Abdul-Aziz Atta was the Secretary to Federal Government and Head of the Civil Service until his death in 1972, and she was raised by her mother Iyabo Atta.

A former chartered accountant and CPA, she is a graduate of the creative writing program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her short stories have appeared in journals like Los Angeles Review and Mississipi Review and have won prizes from Zoetrope and Red Hen Press. Her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC. She is the winner of PEN International's 2004/2005 David TK Wong Prize and in 2006, her debut novel Everything Good Will Come was awarded the inaugural Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.

Her short story collection, Lawless, received the 2009 Noma Award For Publishing in Africa. Lawless is published in the US and UK as News From Home.

She lives in Mississippi with her husband Gboyega Ransome-Kuti, a medical doctor, and their daughter, Temi.

Reviews

[Ariel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was an interesting story but I wish I had been given more of an opportunity to delve into how the main character felt, rather than her just describing her reactions.

[Lupe Dominguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow what a book. A young Nigerian woman, Gift, is just graduating and getting ready to look to her future. In her village, though, she lives with her stepmother Madam, while her father, Sir, works in another city. Gift’s mother died when she was young, so Madam is always emphasizing that point. After Gift and her cousin Faith get into a bit of trouble for going to a party of a senator, Madam contrives a plan to send Gift to the US to help her sister Auntie V with her new baby that is going to be born. In exchange, Auntie V and Doctor (Victoria and Jonathan Daniel) would help Gift get into college in the States. However, things take a turn when Auntie V keeps deflecting questions from Gift about when she was going to take the exams and find a college to go to, especially since Gift had been taking care of the baby, Trinity, since her birth. The Daniel’s are separating and this leaves Gift more vulnerable to Auntie V’s manipulations. Finally, Gift has had enough and manages to get away, and this starts a firestorm of legal issues about domestic slavery and child trafficking. The culmination of which, is Gift’s story.

I do wish that there had been a little more on the trial and just what justification that the Daniel’s tried coming up with, and I especially hated that her father still backed up his wife. Like there is no way he didn’t know that she was behind it?? Or was he that gullible? So far removed? I don’t know but I think I hate him the most. Definitely a quick read that shows a side of society that most people don’t think of, those immigrants who come here to the US for a better life, only to be taken advantage of. Not all of them have the means or ways to speak up, and only some are lucky enough to be able to.

[Tofunmi A · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not sure what the point of this book was. I have very mixed feelings about it.

Gift is a Nigerian girl with big dreams who jumps at what seems like a golden opportunity, travelling to the USA for college. What she doesn't know is that her stepmother has made arrangements for her to work as a nanny for the Daniels, a Nigerian-American couple, in exchange for college tuition. What unfolds is a textbook case of domestic servitude dressed up as a family arrangement.

Human trafficking is a complex, fragile issue, especially in African societies where unpaid or underpaid labour is routinely couched in the language of community and family obligation. That complexity deserved more careful handling than it gets here.

Then there's Faith, Gift's friend and a model navigating her own survival in a different way, whose storyline presents a troubling perspective: that ignoring racism is simply the pragmatic price of success. It's written without enough critical distance to feel intentional, and it left a bad taste. And then Gift herself, at the end of it all in an interview with a journalist, says: "It didn't happen to me because I was a girl..." On one level, I understand what Atta was trying to do - Gift is reclaiming her own narrative, refusing to be reduced to a victim. But does she really think she'd have been hoodwinked into travelling abroad to care for someone's baby had she been a boy? The framing troubled me deeply.

I finished the book in a day. I kept asking myself: what is this book actually saying? And I'm still not sure I have an answer.

[Tobi J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ahhhhh I enjoyed reading this book but didn’t like the story! I have strong mixed feelings about the message and complexity of the issues.

There’s so much that’s wrong and it stems from so many other larger issues

In Gift’s own words “it didn’t happen to me because I was a girl … it happened because state colleges in my country were bad, and my father couldn’t afford to send me to a private one.”

I like how Atta builds Gift’s voice and character, she’s intelligent, strong willed and trying to make the most of a truly fucked up situation.

I think The Daniels are portrayed as “not bad people” on purpose, I feel uncomfortable with the way things unfolded and how the situation became fodder for the media but not sure what the alternative was.

[Alice A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book about a girl coming over from Nigeria to be an "au pair" at a extended family relative. She also thinks she is going to attend college.