Blurb
A Broken People’s Playlist is a collection of short stories with underlying themes so beautifully woven that each story flows into the other seamlessly.
From its poignant beginning in “Lost Stars” a story about love and it’s fleeting, transient nature to the gritty, raw musical prose encapsulated in “In The City”, a tale of survival set in the alleyways of the waterside.
A Broken People’s Playlist is a mosaic of stories about living, loving and hurting through very familiar sounds, in very familiar ways and finding healing in the most unlikely places.
The stories are also part-homage and part-love letter to Port Harcourt (the city which most of them are set in). The prose is distinctive as it is concise and unapologetically Nigerian. And because the collection is infused with the magic of evocative storytelling, everyone is promised a story, a character, to move or haunt them.
My Review of A broken people's playlist by Chimeka Garricks
This collection of twelve sublime short stories, takes you by the hand and leads you to the world of the broken, men and women who are mourning losses, suffering from grief, recovering from lifelong traumas.
Inspired by twelve songs, Chimeka Garricks tells beautiful, yet touching stories that would make you feel all your emotions in extremities.
One minute, you're sobbing because a girl who chooses a friend as a fuck-buddy and never as a lover, suddenly realizes she loves him deeply, and it is too late, because she faces a tragedy that she would never recover from.
And the next, you're pondering when it is ever done, for a man to throw his funeral party when he's still alive.
Mostly set in Port Harcourt city, Garricks reveals the lives of young boys who would join a 'confra' in University, and a best friend who wouldn't, couldn't wriggle out of that chasm of grief, of losing his closest buddy.
This book is an amalgam of stories that tell tales of grief, of regrets, of broken dreams, of love, of mistakes, of family. Of a man who discovers his partial erectile dysfunction is his wife's pattern of taming him, of a young boy whose tragedy is triggered by a compromising video seen on his phone.
Of an ambitious young boy, whose dreams of becoming a star is shattered, and who finds it difficult to adjust into the truth of knowing whom his true father was. Of an introvert, who cheats on his wife with a work colleague, and who realizes he might never be able to experience what true love means again, because that part of his wife which supplies him with enough doses of that, is dead and gone.
A broken people's playlist is a book inspired by music, how songs have the power of healing, how they can save you the hassle of arguing with your wife, just by singing "Mammy Water," by Victor Uwaifo.
In all, it's a wonderful book and I enjoyed every bit of it.
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