This Kind Of Trouble (2025)

By Tochi Eze 

Genre: Debut Novel About The Ghosts Of Our Families And The Prices That Eventually Have To Be Paid For Our Choices 

Recommended For: Someone who can avoid speculation/plot guessing and is willing to let the author take them on a sometimes-uncomfortable journey and create questions for them to ask themselves in the form of a saga they’ll be thinking about for a long time.

I once heard a famous musician - I’ll leave them nameless so as to not distract you too much from the point I’m planning to make here - talk about their discography. They mentioned the critical success of their first album and how it is hard for any artist to reasonably top their debut album, not because of fame and success or anything like that but because they have their whole life up to that point to come up with the material for that first album, and they’ll only ever have a couple years to make another one. 

I don’t know if Tochi Eze just had this book in her waiting to come out, and more than anything else, it was the culmination of her experiences and thoughts and lessons and ambitions and efforts. You finish reading a book like this, knowing that it’s the only book the author has written up to this point, and you wonder if it was simply the book they were meant to write or whether they are capable of writing something as stirring again. 

Not knowing the answer to that dilemma, I’ll probably pre-order her next book to find out.

This Kind of Trouble takes place in Atlanta and London for stretches, but the heart of its story is set in Nigeria, both 1960s Lagos and a specific village called Umumilo in 1905. Those two time periods serve as family origins and personal histories that help explain a story being told in a more modern setting in 2005. 

It’s about curses and where they start and how they will pass from generation to generation until a price has been adequately paid. It’s also about the disruption of tradition from within a culture and from outside a culture and how indifferences towards peoples’ beliefs can crater communities. Belief systems across the world have similar flaws because they came about for similar reasons, but greed, power, and subjugation are their own kind of hierarchical beliefs, and pretty much without exception the wrong people suffer their consequences.

I regret not reading it more quickly. I tend to adhere to a habit of slowing down when I decide that a book is particularly affecting, as if it needs to be cherished and rationed and not treated like junk food. This is a heavy book. There are intense moments of sadness and worry, so I don’t think anyone would call it a beach read, but it would probably benefit from embracing your urge to want to know what’s happening next, where the story is going. There are constant jumps back and forth in time, so just keeping the story straight will be easier if you don’t set it down for too long. 

None of this is a big ask because the writing is excellent. There’s almost a sternness in the confidence of Eze’s writing that had me thinking about how the easiest way for people to describe great writing is to take snippets of vivid scene descriptions as evidence of a writer’s power. That is the easiest way to describe great writing, and it is also how we should describe writing to a child to make sure they understand the basic concept of writing, but that isn’t what makes a writer great or what makes a novel great.

A great novel conditions or even manipulates their reader, if only temporarily, and a good reader knows the feeling of that particular type of manipulation coming and holds on, understanding the difference between being challenged and something more sinister. Eze, for example, can do a certain kind of place setting with her characters. You establish a certain confidence as a reader like, I don’t like this side character. I can see how other people might be fine with her, but I’m smart enough to know that she is selfish. Then, as you read a little a little bit longer, you wonder whether Eze wrote the character to have you perceive her in that exact way. And then you read even more and your entire perception of the character shifts and you realize that there are very few characters in this book for whom you can cast moral judgements upon. 

Eze doesn’t create cliffhangers or leave you clues that would really make it worth it to guess what is going to happen next. She just primes you to be able to accept intense emotionally charged circumstances in her characters’ lives and move forward to the next chapter. 

Passages read simply and effectively instead of showy. Take the end of this chapter:

“He rubbed her tummy, then tickled her sides. Margaret squealed. She walked to the fridge, then to the bathroom. By the time she came out, she was still smiling.” 

It’s hard to convey how much work has been laid in the book up to that point to lead us to question the sincerity of that smile. Not with long internal monologues or descriptions of how she felt leading up to that moment, just with a sense that, for this person, either possibility could be true. It might be a real smile. It might not. That doesn’t sound like a cliffhanger. But there’s a chill to those words based on the foundation that Eze had already laid.

Each chapter is titled by the perspective of the character that chapter is being told from. That particular chapter is not titled after either Margaret or the one rubbing her tummy (Benjamin). Instead, it’s titled “Lovers,” making it all the more difficult to assign a specific thought process or meaning to any given action. 

That’s Eze’s hand at work, taking us from point to point, telling us her story; the story she’s had her whole life up this point, and maybe lives before this one, to come up with. 

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