Lovely Road Such a Lonely

by Kagiso Lesego Molope

[clementine]

2.5 stars

Wow, I really wanted to like this one but I struggled a lot. There were some interesting dynamics - between the attitudes of people in the cities and townships, between Kabelo's lack of shame about his sexuality in certain company and his desire to make his parents and community proud. But this felt like a first draft, in more ways than one. There was a frustrating lack of interiority; I just wanted more depth out of it. There were a lot of sloppy typos and clunky sentences that made this seem unedited and amateurish. The blurb, which promises a story set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, was never fully realized: AIDS is barely mentioned until about the last third of the novel, and it's not exactly integral to the plot. And at the end of the day, the story was ultimately pretty predictable.