Book Review: The Changing Man by Tomi Oyemakinde

‘The Changing Man’ was released in 2023, it was author, Tomi Oyemakinde’s debut novel and explores the truth behind an urban legend, and the importance of having friends to support you through hard times.

The story follows Ife, who has been at her new prestigious boarding school for a month, and despite the fact it is an amazing opportunity, she doesn’t feel like herself there. As an Urban Achiever, her uniform is different and indicates she is different, and her security blanket of her old friend group has left her hesitant to make friends at school.

At the start, Ife learns about the urban legend of The Changing Man, and how the student body speculate that Leon, one of the older students, disappeared because he’d been taken, leaving his younger brother, Ben behind. Ben, is clearly not coping with his older brother going missing.

Ife doesn’t believe the stories about The Changing Man until the closest thing she has to a friend at the school, Malika, one of the few black girls at the school, stands her up on a late-night trip to see Ife’s friends in a nearby town after curfew, only to reappear the next day looking completely different and associating with people she had no interest in before. Seeing Malika do a complete 180, Ife suddenly begins to think maybe that mythical being isn’t completely fictional.

Along with Leon’s younger brother, Ben, and a potentially overzealously friendly fellow Urban Achiever, Bijal, Ife seeks to find out what happened to Malika. But the deeper they go down the rabbit hole, the harder it will be to turn back and pretend it never happened.

I enjoyed this book, I found it a fun puzzle I wanted to solve, especially at the start. That sense of uncanny and othering that came from the surreal boarding school experience was so immersive. It feels wrong at Nithercott. It feels wrong that Ife had her phone confiscated and wouldn’t get it back until she’d served over twenty school days’ worth of detention. The disciplinary system at a school that is so enclosed felt suffocating and I related to.

I loved how mysterious and paranormal ‘The Changing Man’ is, especially at the beginning, where there is this sense of lingering on the uncanny and bizarre elements of what’s going on, from the focus on something as mundane and pleasant as petrichor, to strange orange mist, the iridescent flowers and weird mushrooms. It was so interesting to understand what was going on, and watch the dominoes fall into place.

Elements of this story fell a bit short for me, I loved Ife’s character, but I struggled with aspects of her narration. While Oyemakinde demonstrated that Ife was much more confident among her friends in her old school, her internal monologue was filled with character, that slowly makes its way out into the world as she accepts the hand of friendship from Bijal and Ben. But, despite the narration having a lot of personality, it was very simile and metaphor heavy and once I noticed it, it really stood out to me and at times, being hit by simile after simile after simile started to get annoying.

What threw me a bit was Bijal and Ife’s spat, and how Bijal accused Ife of being selfish and everything being about her. I didn’t get that impression of Ife, especially not after she managed to recover her phone from where it had been stashed. If Ife was really that self-centred, and the original reason to speak to Bijal was eliminated, then Ife would have just left her alone. For me, it came out of nowhere! Maybe I was too wrapped up in the lore and the breadcrumbs being left behind in the wake of The Changing Man, but I was just as taken aback as Ife, if not more.