In writing A Good Name, author Yejide Kilanko builds a layered and complex novel that highlights the burden cultural expectations can have in shaping the lives of new immigrants. Fast-paced and arresting from the start, Kilanko manages to drill into the heart of the two main characters with whip-smart dialogue and steady attention to detail.

The novel begins from the perspective of Nigerian-born cab driver Eziafa Okereke. After toiling in the United States for more than twelve years, Eziafa grows impatient waiting for his American Dream to come true. He’s weary from working hard and having little to show for it. Eventually, Eziafa allows the mounting pressure from his widowed mother back home to sway him towards an arranged marriage. When he sees Zina in his village’s town square—bright, beautiful, and twenty years his junior—he thinks he has found the key to turning his fortunes around: a young girl he can mold into the Nigerian-American wife he desires.

Zina dreams of attending business school in Nigeria and marrying a local boy but she is trapped by her family’s expectations and meager circumstances. So when she agrees to the arrangement, it is with the hope that in her new country, she may find a way to change the drumbeat that her old life imposes. But when the drummers change their beats, Kilanko asks, can the dancers really change their steps?

Eziafia and Zina are three-dimensional and distinct with rich personalities and strong opinions. Kilanko’s depictions of their disappointments are unsparing and honest. She’s not afraid to paint them both into dubious moral corners, which lends the narrative a refreshing humanity that you don’t often find in novels that chronicle the immigrant experience.

Kilanko’s writing is at its best in the second half of the novel. Here, Kilanko focuses largely on Zina’s perspective and her experiences trying to adjust to her new home in Houston.

A heated exchange at a family planning clinic, when Zina is mistaken for Eziafa’s daughter, is a particularly striking example of Zina’s lack of agency in her new home. “Are things okay at home?” the nurse asks when her husband is out of earshot. “‘Zina nodded. ‘Yes.’ She averted her eyes. ‘My husband just likes to get his way.’”

The constraints of dislocation and the impossible pressure that both characters’ families place on them are most keenly felt in the last pages of the novel when the consequences of their choices and actions come to a boil with an ending that may leave readers stunned but left me wondering if this was the drumbeat that Kilanko had been building to all along. A Good Name will keep you thinking about the difficulties of immigrant life in America long after you put down this unexpected, page-turner-of-a-read.

Amelie Laura Francis graduated in the pre-internet age from Concordia University with a degree in English Literature. She worked for over a decade in Special Events for several professional sports leagues before becoming a full-time mother and freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Chatelaine, the New York Times and the Globe and Mail. She currently lives in Port Perry, Ontario.