Polysemous words and expressions are fascinating things.
Take the phrase ‘Hail Mary” for instance, which could either mean a last-ditch effort with very little chance of success, or refer to a traditional Catholic prayer. Given how the women and girls in Funmi Fetto’s nine-story collection find themselves wedged between faith and frustration, Hail Mary is a fitting book title.
Most of the stories take place in the recent past and read like an invitation to travel, not just between Nigeria and the UK where these tales are set, but back in time to a world before smartphones and WhatsApp calls; an England where red phone booths have yet to become relics and a Nigeria where the kobo is still in circulation. The characters’ frustrations -be it with their family dynamics, fertility or finances – feel just as poignant as those their real-life
contemporary counterparts wrestle with, and so this backward glance never settles into full-blown nostalgia.
As the title suggests, religion is a dominant theme in this book. In the titular story, a scammer masquerading as a generous saint appropriates the moniker ‘Hail Mary’ to boost her reputation. For some of the characters, their religious affiliation is a garment that can be takenoff and exchanged for another when it no longer fits. For others, their faith is a complication as in ‘Wait’ where the narrator considers the different choices she might have made had she not bought into her church’s teachings about marriage, and in ‘The Tail of a Small Lizard’ where an
agnostic character cannot divorce herself from thinking in religious analogies. For most however, faith is a crutch to hold on to in desperate times.
When prayer fails, migration is assigned a messianic role, like the case of the jubilant pastor’s wife in 2 Samuel 6:14 who views an American green card as her ticket out of an unhappy marriage. Contrarily, for the characters who make it out of Nigeria but struggle with assimilating in the diaspora, their migrant identity soon becomes a millstone. This dichotomy is best captured in Trip, in which an orphaned teenager looking forward to starting life afresh in the UK realises a little too late that London is not the paradise she has long fantasised about.
In her colourful descriptions, there are hints of Fetto’s second career as a fashion journalist. (She is the style editor at British Vogue and the author of Palette, a beauty bible for black women.) Like Erving Goffman who penned The Presentation of Self, Fetto’s radar is attuned to how people employ clothes and cosmetics in crafting their personal narratives and the varying results. In “Unspoken”, a sex worker eschews a trendy perfume for a more niche scent
because “men don’t remember women who smell like every other woman” while in “Dodo is Yoruba for Fried Plantain,” a woman’s fashion-forward wardrobe marks her out as an outsider in her working-class childhood neighbourhood but doesn’t quite earn her acceptance in the snobbish world she has married into. In ‘Housegirl’, an affluent Madame turns to expensive face creams to achieve the “Blue Band margarine” skin her housegirl has been favoured with, demonstrating that beauty, be it the strived for or the naturally attained kind, is an ineffective shield against the crippling darts society often throws at women.
The collection’s focus on the lived experience of Nigerian women at home and abroad will no doubt remind readers of Molara Wood’s Indigo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck which covered similar ground. The quality of writing in Fetto’s foray into fiction is just as impressive as that of her predecessors.
Remember the name; Funmi Fetto is an author to pay attention to. It is surprising that none of the stories here have had previous outings in literary journals, which makes Fetto’s debut that much more impressive. Already, “Unspoken”, about a woman revisiting her childhood trauma, made the longlist for the 2025 V.S Pritchett Short Story Prize.
As the rest of the 2025-2026 literary award season gets underway, it would not be surprising to see Fetto’s entire collection emerge as a serious contender for other notable prizes. This reader will be praying for her continued success.
**Akumbu Uche is a writer and storyteller from Nigeria. Her works have been published by thelagosreview.ng, Aké Review, Brittle Paper, Canthius, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.
