Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel, Freshwater, tells the story of gods, ọgbanje, trapped in a human body—the body of Ada, an Igbo girl born “with one foot on the other side.” The first chapters are narrated by the collective of gods who find themselves trapped within Ada at her birth, with Ada beginning to narrate when she’s older. Despite the ọgbanjes’ early desires to die (so that they could be free to return home), they end up loving Ada deeply and wanting to protect her above everything. They don’t mean to cause so much harm and destruction:

Allow us a moment to explain a few things. When you break something, you must study the pattern of the shattering before you can piece it back together. So it was with the Ada. She was a question wrapped up in a breath: How do you survive when they place a god inside your body? We said before that it was like shoving a sun into a bag of skin, so it should be no surprise that her skin would split or her mind would break. . . . We did the best we could.

Between the ọgbanje pushing for Ada's death early on and traumas Ada suffers at other people's hands, Ada develops separate selves as she fights to live and search for even a scrap of peace. Each alter takes control, usually seeking to protect Ada, but often acting in opposition to Ada's wishes. The alters use her body for pleasure and pain, abuse substances, shift her gender and sexuality, put her into danger, and step in to protect her from abuse.

As each alter develops, whoever controls Ada's body at any given point also controls the narrative. While disorienting at first, Emezi expertly shifts points of view, allowing all of these characters to tell their versions of Ada's story, which spans decades and continents, bliss and destruction. These are unreliable narrators who admit to as much early on:

This is all, ultimately, a litany of madness—the colors of it, the sounds it makes in heavy nights, the chirping of it across the shoulder of the morning. Think of brief insanities that are in you, not just the ones that blossomed as you grew into taller, more sinful versions of yourself, but the ones you were born with, tucked behind your liver.

Emezi's prose is breathtaking throughout. It both stabilizes and destabilizes the narrative: it pulls us deep inside each of Ada's selves and allows us to see through each of their eyes—as they detach from reality and spiral out of control, as Ada sometimes allows this and sometimes wrestles control back for herself. Freshwater tells the story of gods trapped in a human body, yes—and the story of that god-born human struggling, yet ultimately determined, to survive it.