A review by thatothernigeriangirl
All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom by Deborah Santana

5.0

First off, I have to commend the cover of this book! The design is lovely and the material is so velvety, like it’s design to take care of your hands 🤗.
Also, if you notice, hidden within the art work, is this sentence; ‘What does yes look like?”. So kudos to the publisher and the artist.
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Asides the 5 Star cover, ATWIMFS is a collection of 69 beautifully written, well detailed and succinct essays. All of these essays were written by WoCs, of all types and with very diverse heritage. My friend m and I agreed that we have the editor, Deborah Santana, to thank for the precision. I mean, the longest essays was only 8 pages long (and for very good reasons).
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The essays were grouped under 8 different subsets; that touched on identity, migration, career, beauty, family and even illnesses. This categorization made the reading experience enjoyable for me because it felt like a rollercoaster and I wasn’t overwhelmed with the large number of essays.
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Did I also mention that the writing was so diverse in terms of POVs and you can still sense the collective struggle? Writers as young as 20 and as old as 65 contributed to the anthology and you couldn’t eventell from the writing (except the writer mentions their age in the short bio).
I advice you to create space on your tbt list because there are a lot of recommended reads (films and blogs) to add.
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One final observation, the diversity in popularity of each writer drove me to one conclusion; we should never dismiss the struggles of any woman based on whether or not, she’s well known in the society. Popularity doesn’t diminish/eliminate the feminine struggle. This book is a solid 5 Star and I’ll recommend it to everyone.


A Favorite quotes from the books:
“This time you will be a woman,
This time you will be a revolution,
This time your story will be told.”

Ugochi Egonu, All The Women in my Family Sing