This book was tough for me to rate. I didn’t really NOT like it, and the plot was good, and it was an easy read. But I have notes.
I liked the plot: Vimbai, hairdresser in Harare, Zimbabwe, enjoys local fame as the best hairdresser around until an unknown (male!) hairdresser comes in and steals her thunder. Her old loyal customers are won over by this new hair magician and she, of course, is overcome with jealousy. Gradually, we learn her story: she’s a single mom caring for a daughter after her rich ne’er-do-well boyfriend/father of her child left her. She and her family had a disastrous falling out, so she’s on her own. And, inevitably, she and the Hair Magician form a kind of friendship, secrets are revealed, bonding takes place, hijinks and romance ensue, catastrophes loom. It’s charming…even if you can predict the ending a mile away.
I deducted stars for style. Too many chapters ended on obvious cliffhangers: “I was about to learn just how affluent they were…” “If my day had ended then, it would have been a success and I would have been saved from the embarrassment of what happened later…” “The contents were worse than anything I could have imagined…” The problem is mainly that we, the readers, can easily guess what comes next, both in the next chapter, and in the overall plot. (I mean…this is the only male hairdresser in the city, and his parents welcome you with open arms despite your illegitimate child? He got uncomfortable when the pastor at church railed against homosexuality? He’s gorgeous but doesn’t seem to have any experience with women? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE THE REASON?) So the fulfilment of each cliffhanger felt anticlimactic, which is something that a story like this should not be.
The main character is developed in that you can relate to her concerns as a single mom trying to make ends meet in a Zimbabwe that is fast going downhill. But the other characters aren’t really there–for instance, one of the fellow hairdressers is always looking at her “with satanic eyes” and is obviously “gleeful” when Vimbai loses customers to Mr. Hair Magician. But there’s nothing more to this character than that: is this woman (and others) really so petty as to exhult in her co-worker’s downfall? Why/why not? Is she just mean, or is our narrator a tad unreliable or unlikeable?
The writing style is very “subject, predicate” and therefore comes across as a bit stilted: “This happened, I felt this way, then this other thing happened.” For instance, there’s a whole paragraph about how they saw the movie “Hitch” in the cinema, and how they enjoyed the dialogue between Will Smith and Eva Mendes. I kept wanting to get out a red pen and edit to make it flow: we don’t need to hear that the movie was “hilarious”, you know? Later, in a hospital scene as Vimbai considers a truly terrible situation, she says, “I hoped everything would turn out okay.” I mean…of COURSE you hope everything turns out okay. Word choices sometimes seemed like they had been picked out of a thesauraus. With such loaded topics and such an interesting premise and characters, I wanted MORE. More development. More background. More style. More verve!
But let’s bring it back to what I liked: this story is about Zimbabwe, a country where a hairdresser makes business decisions based on the fact that “the country’s average life expectancy was 37.” (Yiiiikes.) And in Zimbabwe, there are some things you can talk about at the hair salon–the struggle to make ends meet, family woes, sex, boyfriends, corruption, the price of maize–and there are some that you definitely can’t. This book talks about all those things, and that is what makes it worthwhile.
