Eyo by Abidemi Sanusi book review

I think I shall start sharing my thoughts & feelings about books I have read...wish I could start to backdate but dang I have read a lot of books in my lifetime...all sorts but typically non-mills&boons stuff, I consider myself a serious reader, no offense to those who read Mills & Boons! But then again I read the entire Twilight series (cue for some to leave this page in disgust lol) Enough of my bla bla bla, this post is about Eyo. A friend recommended I read it. It brought actual tears to my eyes & the night I started reading it I didn't sleep until the next morning because I had to finish it.

A brief synopsis is: Eyo, sent over to UK from Nigeria to work as a maid for two young children, when she is still a child herself.  She is mistreated and basically becomes a slave, she is abused by those who are supposed to be taking care of her and then passed on from one hand to another as a sex slave from that point on.

At several points in the book, I found myself angry, firstly at the bystanders when injustice is happening.  Martin Luther King Jr did say that "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting 

against it is really cooperating with it."  So, when the friends of the family that was using 

Eyo as house help, suspected her maltreatment, instead of looking away, and not 

confronting the issue they should have done something!  Mrs Richards, the 'nosy' eldery neighbour, did the exact opposite and alerted the authorities.  It is a sad world we live in, because most of the time when wrong doing is happening we run away for fear of harm to ourselves, we do not want to get involved...

The next stage was when Eyo was working in a brothel, as a "special services" girl, to cater especially to the clientele who had a fetish for young girls.  The problem is the fact that there are men who want to sleep with pre-pubescent girls, I cannot begin to describe how much that makes my stomach turn in disgust.  I have absolutely nothing against prostitution, when it is at the will of the woman providing the service, and I think the brothel owner, as cold hearted as she was, should not have been accepting clientele with such fetishes.  Children need protection, and they need that protection from us.

At the end of the day, at the end of the book, if Abidemi wrote this to raise awareness about child abuse and trafficking, she really awakened a beast in me, because this is just not right on so many levels and it has to stop.  I do not have children of my own yet, but I was so maddened at the thought that another human being can want to destroy something so precious as a child.

http://www.stopthetraffik.org/

http://childrenengland.org.uk/afruca/

These sites are useful to educate regular people, like me or you (if you consider yourself regular), and there are ways of how we can help the causes.

I liked the author's facebook page & she added a touching story about a young boy who was killed by his Saudi master - Remembering Bandar Abdulaziz

Please check it out, most importantly please read the book!!

Will try and add some extra book reviews, particularly by African authors, in fact Nigerian female authors are the best, in my opinion, I have read some pretty amazing books & I am so excited about what else is out there waiting for me to discover & learn.

Peace.Love&Happiness