Leave Your Mess at Home: A Family Story About the Weight of Expectations

Photo by Daniela Denyer Malo

I think I may have just read one of the books that will become a classic of our century, up there with Sally Rooney, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Elena Ferrante.

That is a bold statement, I know. But Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola left me with the kind of feeling that makes you want to immediately tell everyone you know to read the same book. Published by Jacaranda Books, and very kindly sent to me for review, this is one of those novels that manages to be deeply specific while somehow feeling universally familiar.

At its heart, Leave Your Mess at Home is a family story. We follow four siblings - Sola, Angela, Karen and Ola - the children of Nigerian immigrants in the United States, as they navigate adulthood, relationships, identity and the expectations that come with being the children of people who have sacrificed everything to give them more.

And that last part is really what makes this novel so compelling.

Because what happens when you grow up believing that your life is, in some way, a repayment?

The immigrant-child dilemma

There is a particular pressure that comes with being the child of immigrants or of parents who made sure you could be the one to leave. Your parents left behind or changed a life they knew, crossed borders, started again and worked towards giving you opportunities they never had. And somewhere along the way, that sacrifice can become an invisible contract.

You are expected to succeed.

Not simply because success is desirable, but because it is supposed to mean something. It is supposed to justify the sacrifice. Every achievement becomes proof that their decision was worth it; every perceived failure can feel like a betrayal. It’s the core of the American Dream.

Akinola explores this idea beautifully through four siblings who could not be more different from one another, while each dealing with an identity crisis in their own way.

Their parents have given them love, opportunity and a vision for their futures. But that love has also come with expectations and strings attached, and each sibling has interpreted those expectations differently.

Four versions of adulthood, identity, and love

Sola is the estranged daughter. After being kicked out of her family home by her strict mother, she has spent roughly a decade building a life away from her family. But just as the novel begins, that life falls apart: her long-term boyfriend leaves her for someone else, taking her money with him.

Sola is forced to confront what remains when the life you thought you had built suddenly disappears.

Then there is Ola, who is married to Marisol, an Argentinian woman, and is only weeks away from becoming a father.

Their marriage is already struggling, and impending parenthood forces Ola to confront questions about the kind of father he wants to become.

He wants his biracial child to receive the love his own father gave him, but also the opportunities his father was never able to provide.

It is one of the most interesting tensions in the book: the desire to preserve what was beautiful about your upbringing while deliberately breaking the parts that hurt.

Anjola, meanwhile, is the perfectionist.

She is the daughter who has internalised every dream her parents ever had for her and turned those dreams into a checklist. She is successful, responsible and constantly trying to do the right thing.

But she is also in love with her best friend, who is now engaged to someone else.

Anjola's journey is, in many ways, about learning that being the "good" person does not necessarily mean denying yourself everything you want. She is a walking moral dilemma. There is something particularly refreshing and beautiful about watching someone who has spent her entire life being the person everyone can be proud of finally ask herself what she actually wants.

And then there is Karen, who is perhaps the loneliest of the four.

She is figuring out her sexuality, her place in the world and what it means to feel comfortable in her own skin. Her vitiligo contributes to the insecurity and isolation she experiences, but her story never becomes reduced to it. Instead,

Akinola allows Karen to exist as a complicated young woman trying to understand herself while desperately wanting to be understood by everyone else.

Four siblings, four completely different lives. And yet, underneath everything, they are dealing with variations of the same question:

Who am I supposed to be, and who do I actually want to become?

The beauty of complicated families

What I loved most about this book is that it does not try to create heroes and villains within the family.

People hurt each other. Parents make mistakes. Children make mistakes. Siblings misunderstand one another. People say things they cannot take back. Sometimes love is expressed in ways that are controlling, misguided or simply painful.

And it is not justified, but Akinola constantly brings us back to the idea that people are complicated beyond words.

That does not mean hurtful behaviour should be excused. Rather, the novel asks us to understand that people often act from the limited emotional tools and knowledge they have at the time.

And sometimes, what looks like anger is fear, what looks like parental control is love, what looks like rejection is someone who does not know how to communicate, what looks like selfishness is someone desperately trying to protect themselves.

I found that incredibly moving and true.

There is something very grown-up about a novel that allows you to hold two truths at once: someone can love you deeply and still hurt you; your parents can have sacrificed everything for you and still have gotten things wrong; you can love your family and still need distance from them.

Coming back to yourself

Although this is very much a family novel, I don't think Leave Your Mess at Home is ultimately about the family only.

It is about finding your way back to yourself, to love, to hope.

Each of the siblings has to reckon with an identity that has, to some extent, been handed to them. The successful daughter. The estranged daughter. The responsible son. The lonely girl.

And part of growing up is deciding which parts of those identities actually belong to you. That is what makes the book feel so universal and relatable in its own way.

You don't have to be the child of immigrants to understand the feeling of living according to someone else's expectations either. Most of us have, at some point, been a version of ourselves designed to make somebody else happy.

The difficult part is figuring out what happens when you finally realise that you don't have to.

I am going to say very little about the ending because I genuinely think it deserves to be experienced rather than explained.

But I loved it.

It is one of those endings that makes the entire journey feel more meaningful in retrospect, and it left me with exactly the kind of emotional satisfaction I want from a family saga.

And considering this is already a Reese's Book Club pick, I would not be surprised if we eventually see this story make its way onto the screen. If that happens, I will absolutely be watching.

There are so many moments in this book that feel made for television - complicated family dinners, romantic disasters, sibling confrontations, moments of self-discovery. I can already imagine the adaptation.

So should you read it? Yes. Immediately.

Leave Your Mess at Home is emotional without becoming sentimental, complicated without becoming confusing, and deeply rooted in the immigrant experience without making that experience the only thing its characters are allowed to be.

It is a book about family, but also about ambition, identity, love, sexuality, parenthood, grief, sacrifice, and the strange process of becoming an adult while still carrying the expectations of the people who raised you.

Most importantly, it understands that sometimes growing up means realising that you can love the people who made you without having to become the person they imagined you would be.

I genuinely, genuinely loved this book. So go read it, and then come back and tell me whether you loved it as much as I did.

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Edited by Ainhoa Aron, Literature Editor