{"id":23953,"date":"2026-02-22T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/?p=23953"},"modified":"2026-02-05T15:22:33","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T14:22:33","slug":"kekeli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/2026\/02\/22\/kekeli\/","title":{"rendered":"Kekeli"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jessica Mawuena Lawson\u2019s debut novel Kekeli<\/em> is set in that magical time between high school graduation exams and whatever comes next. During these few weeks, young adults often suddenly find themselves with a lot of time on their hands. The protagonist, who is named Kekeli \u2013 like the book itself \u2013, uses this opportunity to try new things and falls in love for the first time. Kekeli\u2019s search for identity, her kindness, and her curiosity characterize this novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kekeli lives with her white<\/em> German mother and her father, who immigrated from Togo, in a small town in southern Germany. Kekeli has just finished her last days at high school, and her father and her aunt ask her to look after her cousin Afi, who is visiting Germany from Togo for a while. Meeting Afi, Kekeli realizes that she knows little about her relatives in Togo and hasn\u2019t even met many of them yet \u2013 her not so affluent parents were not able to pay for a visit during her childhood and youth \u2013 she doesn\u2019t speak Ewe and she can\u2019t eat akoum\u00e9 with her fingers. Afi makes her feel insecure and Kekeli finds it difficult to read her, which also makes Afi an inscrutable character for readers, since the story is told from Kekeli\u2019s perspective. Nevertheless, the two spend a lot of time together and experience an unexpected adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kekeli and Afi are invited by Kekeli\u2019s classmate Kwame and his older brother Kofi \u2013 the significantly wealthier sons of a Ghanaian diplomat \u2013 to take a road trip through Germany to conduct interviews for a documentary film about Black history and contemporary Black experiences in Germany. This week-long trip, which culminates in the group spending a few days in Berlin, takes up most of the book. The generous funding, the spontaneity of the project, and the limited prior knowledge that especially Kekeli and Afi bring to it seem somewhat unrealistic, but they sound like fun and desirable circumstances \u2013 and in a novel, everything is possible. The young adults learn a lot, and the passages in which they recount their newly acquired knowledge for the documentary or discuss it with each other sometimes sound a bit textbook-like. But that doesn\u2019t detract from the book as a whole. Its focus is on Kekeli\u2019s introspection, including her growing feelings for the nice, attentive Kwame. Small misunderstandings and Kekeli\u2019s discovery of a family secret keep the tension going until the very end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I really enjoyed Jessica Mawuena Lawson\u2019s warm-hearted and sometimes sweet debut novel. I would particularly recommend Kekeli<\/em> to readers who are about to graduate from high school, to get inspired, or to those who fondly remember this exciting time of seemingly endless possibilities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(This novel is only available in German)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessica Mawuena Lawson\u2019s debut novel Kekeli is set in that magical time between high school graduation exams and whatever comes next. During these few weeks, young adults often suddenly find themselves with a lot of time on their hands. The protagonist, who is named Kekeli \u2013 like the book itself \u2013, uses this opportunity to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":23950,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2416,103],"tags":[3267,1413,938,571,2798,3126,3266,3265,2420,3260,3259,3268,1189,3264,3197,2653,1423],"class_list":["post-23953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magazine","category-review","tag-abitur","tag-berlin-en","tag-black-german-experience","tag-black-german-history","tag-black-german-literature","tag-coming-of-age-novel","tag-dokumentarfilm-uber-schwarze-geschichte","tag-first-love","tag-germany-en","tag-jessica-mawuena-lawson","tag-kekeli","tag-nach-dem-abitur","tag-novel-2","tag-road-trip","tag-suddeutschland","tag-togo-en","tag-verbrecher-verlag-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23953"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23956,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23953\/revisions\/23956"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}