Overall I was a bit disappointed in this book. I found the dialogue stilted and unbelievable at times, and I think the plot was really lacking. But I liked reading about Belinda's relationship with the lovely Mary, and her experiences in London.

A wonderful insight into Ghanian life through the eyes of a young girl. For full review go to https://joebloggshere.tumblr.com/post/178510967681/hold-by-michael-donkor-also-known-as-housegirl

WOW. What a debut book. Beautifully written, you've hooked straight away. It is set in both London and Ghana. Go and read it. Not only is the cover beautiful but the book itself is truly wonderful.

Thank you, NetGalley Nd Harper Collins UK for giving me the opportunity to read ’Hold’ in exchange for my unbiased and honest review.

A very polite African girl who works as a companion to a young girl is whisked away to London to be the sensible companion to a young miss there instead. So she enters a new and confusing world.

Struggled to get into this but when I did I really enjoyed it. Donkor is a fantastic writer injecting humour and great insight into this story.

I have tried to approach this book at least 3 times. I have also failed to finish it at every attempt. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't make it through.

I didn’t really enjoy this book not sure why but did not find it captivating. Unfortunately I gave up before finishing.

The prologue opens at the funeral of an unidentified person, lodging a question in the back of the reader’s mind as the events of earlier that year (2002) unfold in the rest of the book.

Belinda and Mary are housegirls in the home of a wealthy Ghanaians couple who, following custom, the girls refer to as ‘Aunty’ and ‘Uncle’. (Personally, I would have liked more background about the role and employment/legal status of housegirls in Ghanaian society to help me understand better the relationship.) Belinda and Mary indulge in gentle, good-humoured bickering as they prepare and serve food to their exacting ‘Aunty’ and ‘Uncle’ alongside other daily household duties such as cleaning, laundry and shopping. Mary, in particular, has a quirky sense of humour and an optimistic outlook on life while Belinda, a few years Mary’s senior, is conscious of her role as advisor and guide.

Soon, the two girls are separated when Belinda is sent to London to befriend Amma, the daughter of another rich Ghanaian couple, Mrs and Mrs Otuo. Belinda’s arrival into the confusion of the airport is conveyed in an impressionistic way. ‘A gentle voice came down in a different language. Then another. And then another. […] Strip lighting overhead, black arrows on yellow, corridors with moving floors. […] Queuing. Strip lighting overhead, black arrows on yellow, corridors with moving floors. […] The beeping. The thing to do next: reach the gathering at the tracks that went in a big loop. Stooped older women stood behind concerned men. Bored toddlers harassed teddies’ limbs. Lots of tutting at watches, followed by sighing when suitcases came through the lazy mouth.’ Admit it; you’re there with Belinda at the purgatory that is Baggage Reclaim.

On the journey to her new home, Belinda wonders at the unfamiliar sights of London. ‘…London was one big black road with cars. The motorway gradually thinned out into smaller roads, where there were stores selling rows of plastic bodies – some naked, some clothed – frozen in the middle of dances.’

The author takes the reader through the trajectory of the two girls’ relationship from Amma’s initial suspicion of Belinda’s motives, expressed through a sullen refusal to communicate – ‘…the idea of a visitor itched at her. No privacy. Someone watching, asking questions. Someone else to think about.’ – to Belinda’s gradual breaking down of the emotional barriers Amma has erected, guided by Mary’s sage advice in their periodic funny, chatty phone calls. ‘My sister, if one is a quiet, you have to find clever tricks for to stop them being as that. Sneak into her to make her chat properly.’

In fact, soon the roles seem to be reversed as Amma becomes a support to Belinda as she struggles to cope with inner demons of her own. These promising developments are swiftly halted when a revelation by Amma conflicts with everything Belinda has been taught about right and wrong. Soon after, a tragic event sees Belinda return to Ghana and in the final section of the book the story picks up the narrative from the prologue.

The book is liberally sprinkled with Ghanaian dialect words that had me making frequent use of the glossary. Conversations are rendered in a distinctive style that I’m aware some reviewers of West African heritage have criticised as inauthentic. I’m in no position to judge but I would say that, authentic or not, it did give me a clear sense that I was reading about characters whose background and ethnicity is different to my own. On that subject, I did enjoy learning about Ghanaian culture: clothing, hairstyles, social customs, entertainment, commerce and food.

Hold is a character-driven story about female friendship, exploring your own identity – cultural, sexual, social – and finding a direction in life.

I was interested by the plot of this book, and reading the experiences of someone moving from Ghana to London.

While the characters were interesting, I don’t think the author went into enough detail about the cultural differences and how Belinda actually felt which meant the story was very slow and not much really happened. Although the story is split between Belinda and Amma, the girl she has come over to help, there are far more chapters on Belinda.

An interesting story, but doesn’t give enough of an insight into what it is like to move from one country to another very different one.

I didn't enjoy this book for several reasons. I disliked the main character and found some of her opinions distasteful. Furthermore, I wasn't sure what the author was intending to convey by giving his character such opinions then seemingly never addressing them. This was also the case with the character of Amma's mother and her transphobic rant. I also did not care for the author's treatment of Amma. The resolution of her story was far from satisfactory and seemed at odds with the character. The complex and compelling Amma and her struggle with her sexuality was one of the more enjoyable aspects of the story and I felt aggrieved that the last we know of her the author has decided to send her on a date with a boy!

I did enjoy the idiosyncratic speech patterns of Belinda and Mary which were beautifully written.

Belinda knows her place in the world, when her father cannot pay for her anymore, her mother sends her away to work in the household of people she calls Aunt and Uncle in accordance with Ghanaian customs. She is not the only maid there, also 11-year-old Mary works for them and quickly becomes something like a sister Belinda never had. When Belinda is sent to England to take care of Amma, a girl her own age, the two have to part which isn’t easy for either of them. Yet, they manage to stay in contact over the thousands of kilometres that now separate them. Mary wants to know everything about Belinda’s posh life in London, but the older sister cannot tell everything that she experiences in England. Her role is different now which is hard to get used to and people behave in a different way. She misses her home town, but also sees the chance that she is given since she can go back to school and study. When a tragic incident calls her back to Africa, Belinda realises that only a couple of months were enough to change her completely.

Michael Donkor was born in England to a Ghanaian household and trained as an English teacher and completed a Master’s in Creative Writing. He was selected as a “New Face in Fiction” by The Observer in January 2018. “Hold” is his debut novel in which also autobiographical elements can be found even though his protagonist is female and he has lived all his life in the UK.

What I liked about the novel were the different perspectives on life that you get and the difficulties that living between different cultures can mean for you personally but also for the people around you. First of all, I hardly know anything about Ghana so the beginning of the novel when we meet Mary and Belinda, young girls who work full time as maids, gives a short glance at what life in other parts of the world might be. They were not treated especially bad, quite the contrary, but the fact that the lack of money in their family leads to giving up education is something which is far away from our world in Europe.

Most interesting also Belinda’s arrival in London and her awareness of being different. She has brown skin, but this is different from the Asian brown of the Indians or the skin of the girls from Jamaica. It is those slight differences that are of course seen by the members of those groups at the margin but often neglected by the majority society. Even though she shares the same cultural background with Amma, the two girls could hardly be more distinct. The most obvious is their sexual orientation where Belinda sticks to a romantic understanding of love and where Amma has her coming-out as homosexual. Belinda can easily adapt to a lot of things, but this clearly transgresses a line that she will not cross. The girls’ friendship is nothing that comes easy for both of them, but it splendid how Donkor developed it throughout the novel.

Without a doubt, Michael Donkor is a great new voice among the British writers who themselves have made the experience of belonging - but not completely, of being trapped between cultures and having to find their identity while growing up.

Belinda is a teenage Ghanaian village girl, sold by her mother into bonded labour as a servant girl in a big house. The owners of that house, Aunty and Uncle, then sell Belinda on to a Ghanaian family living in London to be a good influence on their wayward daughter Amma.

The issues presented in the novel are real, but the characters are not particularly strong. Belinda in particular is an Everyman character, bland and compliant; not terribly happy but not terribly persuasive that she had any real emotion at all. I confess that I gave up at a third of the way through when I was having trouble telling any of the characters apart or telling where one party stopped and another started. There was no development, no progression and no sign of an actual story. All this made harder by a liberal sprinkling of Twi idioms (yes there is a glossary).

There were some fairly generic Ghana-London comparisons - for example between the tiny houses of the London middle class contrasted with the vast houses in Ghana; and the pressure in Ghana of social appearances. There is the earnestness and hard work of Ghanaians to make the most of meagre resources contrasted with the frivolity of Londoners squandering their advantages. But this is not really adding much to our knowledge of the world.

Mostly, the novel was just boring.

And I know some reviewers have said the novel improves after the first third, but after investing time in getting to that point and having got so little in return, it seemed sensible to cut my losses.

I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Fourth Estate, and the author Michael Donkor.
This book follows Belinda, a teenager from Ghana who makes the difficult journey from house girl in Kumasi to companion in London in the early 2000s.
I struggled to become involved in this story, the reading experience often felt disjointed, and the writing style confusing.
As a South Londoner, I enjoyed all the references to Brixton, Herne Hill, and the surrounding areas I know so well, and Donkor's descriptions of both Ghana and London were vivid.
However, the lack of any major events or suspense in this novel, and an unsatisfactory conclusion, meant that it fell a little flat for me, and so it was hard to maintain interest and keep reading.
Overall, just not a book for me.

Funny, moving and sad, Michael's novel is a beautiful coming of age story. My only disappointment was the lack of closure with so many of the characters.

A really interesting and well told story with wonderful writing. I found myself thinking about it when I was reading it and raced pack to pick it up. Donkor created a powerful story.

A beautiful story set in London and Ghana about growing up and dealing with differences in culture. Beautiful descriptions and engaging characters.

A coming of age story, set between Ghana and London, this is the story of Belinda, a housegirl, who moves to London to help the daughter of her employers friends. Amma (the friends daughter) has become withdrawn and is struggling with something in her life - not her studies though, she's a straight A student. She won't talk to her parents about it, and to begin with, it doesn't look as though she'll talk to Belinda either. Their friendship builds over a period of weeks and months. In this time, Belinda goes back to school in order to gain some qualifications. She seems to feel guilty of having left her fellow housegirl, who she refers to as sister (even though the 12 year old Mary is not her sister by blood, they have bonded over being in the same circumstances of separation from their families at young ages).
This novel explores African attitudes towards sexuality, family and responsibility. It's funny at times, but also incredibly moving. I really enjoyed it. We can see the contrast between life in a Ghanaian city and village, and the difference again between those places and London. A fascinating novel.
many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy of this wonderful book.

I liked the idea of this book but in reality, I found it a really slow read.

Initially Belinda is in Ghana working as a house girl with Mary, a younger girl, who is in training. You learn a bit about their friendship and their daily routines. But then, Belinda is sent to London where a family is hoping that she will be a good influence on their daughter Amma. The rest of the story follows what happens as Belinda gets used to living and studying in London. There are obviously vast cultural differences but I felt these were alluded to rather than explored in detail. The friendship with Mary continues, but becomes a more distant one with phone calls being less frequent.

Most of the book is about the lives of the two teenagers in London. The blurb says that Belinda finds London 'bewildering', actually I thought she settled in easily and coped with the transition really well. It's an OK read, but I don't think the story will stay with me or be a long term favourite.

"The two of them – Amma, Mary – in their own, very different ways , in their different times and places, had made Belinda think and laugh so hard."

Michael Donkor's excellent debut novel Hold is set in Ghana and South-East London. It opens in December 2002 with 17 year-old Belinda grieving at a traditional funeral in Ghana, but then travels back 9 months to find Belinda working, for the previous 6 months, as a house-girl in Daban, Kumsai, for a wealthy couple, who she knows as Aunty and Uncle, albeit not actual relations.

She was sent away from her home village by her mother, who she no longer has any contact with:

"That evening, as Mother had given out her clear instructions about never turning back, perhaps it had been hard to speak so thunderously when, really, under all of that pretending, Mother’s feelings were more unsure and broken."

Although otherwise she seems happy and secure in Daban, and becomes like an elder sister to the other house-girl, 11 year-old Mary. But then a relative of Aunty's arrives from UK, 'Nana', wife of a successful ex-pat businessman Doctor Otuo, and tells Belinda of her own 17 year old daughter, Amma.

"'She is very beautiful girl and the book-smartest you will ever find in the UK. Ewurade! Collecting only gold stars and speaking of all these clever ideas I haven’t the foggiest. They even put her in South London Gazette once because of her brains!’ Nana shook her head in disbelief. ‘And when she has a break from doing her homeworks or doing paintings, we shop together in H& M and have nice chats. And she makes her father very proud so he doesn’t even mind that he lacks a son and he never moans of how dear the private school fees are for his bank balance.’

Belinda took the napkin and folded it into quarters. ‘Daznice,’she said. ‘Sounds very nice for you.’‘

It used to be nice.’ Nana sighed, put down her Gulder. ‘Past. We have to use past tense because is now lost and gone, you get me? As if in the blinking of a cloud of some smoke she has just become possessed. Not talking. Grumpy. Using just one word, two words for communication. As if she is carrying all of the world on her shoulders."

Nana and Aunty have decided, before consulting her, on a plan for Belinda - to send her to the UK to live with the Otuo's, not as a housegirl but simply to try and befriend Amma. Belinda's incentive is that the Otuo's will also send money to her mother, since the latter's earnings from her bar job back in the village are inadequate.

But when she has to break the news to Mary, the conversation doesn't go well, Mary feeling that she is being abandoned:

"‘You seem to do a very good job of not speaking on the tro tro, me boa?’
‘Not really.’
‘Wo se sɛn?’
‘In my head I had very long talk with you. Very long.’
‘Sa?’ Belinda scooped the contents of the asanka into the frying pan and took a big step back while the oil hissed."

The Otuo's live in a vividly drawn South-East London, which proves rather a disappointment to Belinda. Indeed Donkor cleverly hasn't set this up as a contrast between rich London and poor Ghana, if anything the opposite - even their house is rather small compared to Aunty and Uncle's compound:

"Didn’t Nana and Doctor Otuo feel boxed in or too small here? Why did the cars pass right in front of the house – where was the perimeter wall? The swimming pool?
...
The Otuos’ Narbonne Avenue was smart, marked by pointy black lampposts like those outside the Huxtables’ on The Cosby Show repeats Aunty loved. Each morning from her new window, Belinda saw men swinging briefcases and women flicking scarves called pashminas.

But late the following Saturday afternoon, as Nana, Belinda and Amma walked from the house in matching wrappers, a few minutes away on Railton Road, they were somewhere unrecognisable. Clusters of tired buildings were interrupted by a betting shop, an ‘off licence’, the Jamaican Take Away, ‘Chick ‘n’Grillz’. And none of them sold what they promised. Fronts were smashed or boarded up. Even the earlier rain seemed to have collected more dangerously here, lapping at Nana’s peep-toes. A gust came at Belinda with a rumour of nearby bins, beer, and spoiled fruit."

The reader soon realises that Amma's situation is more than just teenage angst:

"It had been ages since the Saturday when she had put away all the important things from the Brunswick Manor Gifted and Talented Residential into the trinket box. On that day, it had rained appropriately and persistently . Amma had waited for weeks and weeks to hear anything, anything at all."

Amma attends an outstanding and prestigious private school SGHS, which one rather suspects draws on St Paul's Girl School (SPGS) where the author himself teaches, albeit he has relocated the school from Hammersmith to Streatham and imposed a school uniform.

"Donkor’s day job as an English teacher also helped him access the female teenage mindset. His current post is at St Paul’s girls’ school in west London. “It’s funny,” he says, “because the girls at school ask me whether they have inspired some of my observations about teenage girls… and yeah, I’m watchful of the ways young people interact. And how direct they are.” (from the Guardian)

And Donkor does indeed skew the speech patterns and behaviour of Amma and her friends:

Yesterday had been AS Results Day: Amma and all the other prefects had been garlanded with As. Clutching certificates they did a show of being surprised, relieved.

Going home after the results was not an option. Party! Max from Alleyn’s! With his fat house near Dulwich Village? Off they went.

Max’s dad laid boxes of wine and buckets of beers on the long dining table before high-fiving his son on his way out. As soon as the door shut, before anyone could protest, Amma swiped the Beaujolais. She ran to the basement, slipped off her Converse and stationed herself in the corner of their library to hide. Until the Addie Lees and faggy final kisses at 5 or 6 a.m., Max’s front room would sweatily ripple with skaters in children’s jewellery, students from Camberwell doing Art Foundations, adjusting dungarees and wearing tiny hats, and the chavvier girls in jeans revealing a tasty inch of arse crack; the Stella-ed up young Tories, thick of lip, expansive of forehead and primed for showy debate. On the edges of the dancing and grinding, over fuzzy Drum’n’Bass, conversation would offer nothing of importance or comfort.

[...]

When have you been most scared?’ Amma asked Helena.
‘Funny question.’
‘Try. Go on.’
‘What do you need to know for?’
‘Why so reluctant, ma chérie?’
Helena’s pinking eyes flashed. ‘When I thought I might drown. But you know about that. So you’re probably after something –’
‘Doesn’t matter. Keep going.’
‘So, OK, I was about eight or something. Mum was going out with that creepy cellist then.’‘Eugh, yeah. With the teeth and the fingernails.’‘The three of us were in Cornwall. He’d never been and Mum was, like, too happs about showing him everything and blah blah."

He even throws in some self-satire of an A-level English teacher at the school:

"‘So, folks, why might Faulks have used this narrative technique in the extract we’re analysing? Can we all remember what we mean by the term “narrative technique”? Who can remember?’

To emphasise ideas in desperate need of razzmatazz or to lend important questions greater jeopardy, the little man at the front of the class stretched his hands out, up, to the side. Mr Stevens – although ‘Titch’ was more informative – sat on the edge of his table, kicking his legs like a child on a swing. Each of the fifteen girls under his tutelage were destined for As and Russell Group universities regardless of his efforts. The prospect, the certainty of success, dispirited Amma.
....
Getting an A for an essay was pleasingly straightforward. There were rules to be followed, well-selected places in paragraphs where untaught flair was required. Hiding her feelings in order to turn into the kind of daughter Nana Otuo wanted presented a greater challenge."

SHGS contrasts to the community school that Belinda attends, at the Otuo's insistence, to study a GCSE in English literature.

A rather lazy comparison would be that Donkor does for the multi-ethnic communities of SE London what Zadie Smith has done for the North-West. The book itself makes a nod in that direction, with Belinda's book shelves soon containing:

"Penguin copies of Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest and Lord of the Flies for Abacus. A Lambeth Borough Library Card that Mrs Al-Kawthari had helped her apply for. Things Fall Apart and White Teeth for fun."

And Macbeth is a key reference, which she studies at the community school:

"Belinda remembered what Macbeth says when he hears about his Lady’s death: how life is only a walking shadow. She had liked the line very much. Mrs Al-Kawthari had put it up on the OHP and asked for volunteers to talk about it. Robert had said it was about God and the riches awaiting us in Heaven. Belinda had not been afraid to only say she found the sentence complicated, beautiful and true."

with Belinda's excessive cleaning, to the Otuo's disapproval given that she is not there to work, reminiscent of Lady Macbeth.

"She was pleased at the muck in its bristles. She got to her feet and turned the hot tap on. With ungloved hands, under the stream of scalding water, she plucked the dirt from those spines until they were as white as she could manage."

The reason for this is buried in her past but gradually becomes clear to the reader, as she thinks back to the day she left her mother.

As the girls gradually open up to each other, Belinda's initial reaction to Amma's secret is far from accepting and Amma fails initially to see why Belinda is so traumatised. But after the tragedy leading to the funeral than opens the book forces Belinda back to Ghana, the two girls have more time to think on the other's situation and their own.

This isn't a novel offering easy closure and all the better for that. If there is a redemptive message from the book it is that ultimately one will be able to cope even with what seem like impossible burdens. Amma slips into a Katherine Mansfield book she lends Belinda for the flight the poem Michiko Dead by Jack Gilbert, from which the novel takes its title:

"He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over.
Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down."

Overall, a beautifully written and powerful novel - recommended.

Belinda is a teenager, working as a housekeeper for Aunty and Uncle in Daban, Kumasi, Ghana. Her Mother needed her to find her own way in the world, away from home, and when this rich pair, not actually related, could take her on, it couldn't have seemed more perfect.

No one told Belinda that they would be picking up a younger girl, Mary, on the way and that she would have to help train Mary to keep the large house with her. Not only was she saying goodbye to her mother forever, she was also taking on a child as well as a household.

Then Aunty and Uncle’s friends from London come to stay. They are so impressed with Belinda that they ask her to come to London to try and bring some Ghanaian magic into their daughter’s life.

Amma is unhappy and disrespectful. Despite being a model student, Amma’s parents can no longer control or understand her and they need help. They think Belinda can help them.

So now, suddenly, when Belinda has lived with the small curve of Mary in her bed, Mary’s defiant laughter in her ears, her life in her heart, Belinda is called to go away to London and fix another child the same age as herself.

We have chapters from both Belinda and Amma’s perspectives. We live the second generation immigrant experience of Amma and we see London and its people through Belinda’s eyes. Her only real connection to home are telephone calls with Mary who moans about her work and offers surprisingly pertinent advice. Mary consistently grasps at all she can get from life, making her as much an inspiration for Belinda as Belinda is for her.

The novel opens with a funeral leaving death hanging over the narrative, the potential of loss a permanent threat.

This is a very beautiful novel that makes the lives of two young girls, on the cusp of adulthood, into something far richer than a straightforward coming of age tale. Generational battles, cultural clashes, moral and social judgement and confusion all rear their heads across the carefully drawn geographies of South London and Daban. And underneath it all beats a message of kindness: kindness to others, yes, but also kindness to the self. There is an emotional depth to the novel that side steps sentiment with carefully unresolved plot lines and strong characters prepared to go back before they can go forward. I thoroughly enjoyed Hold. It asks more questions than it answers, leaving the reader thinking, questioning others and themselves. I hope Hold gains the notoriety it deserves.