This book is utterly charming, laugh‑out‑loud funny, and deeply moving. It portrays resilience — how children raised by grandparents in the countryside, by a nanny in the city and then at boarding school, with little parental presence, can grow up self‑reliant and perceptive. It’s a voice seldom heard in children’s literature and one that heralds a new and powerful wave of African storytelling by Africans, for Africans

Kinyatti, who was himself taken prisoner for six and a half years in 1982 for writing on the Mau Mau movement during Daniel arap Moi’s regime, intimates the hard conditions and torture prisoners faced.

The revised edition stays true to the raw, unfiltered emotion that made the original book such a hit. Nothing fundamental has changed in the book, and that’s the beauty of it. The stories remain intact: bold, unapologetic, and true to Maillu’s original voice. What’s new is the editorial sprucing up.

Imagine a time when topics like abortion, sexual harassment, and even women demanding equality in the bedroom were almost unspeakable—yet Maillu dared to write about them.

Allegations of women sleeping their way to the top aren’t new whether in reality or fiction, and this theme casts a mirror into the state of our societies

This is an enchanting and thoughtful piece of writing that the reader only appreciates by reading slowly and leisurely in order to savour all the juicy morsels the author throws throughout the book.