SANYA…Bold, brave interrogation of patriarchy, settled beliefs

Sànyà is ultimately a story about power inherited power, feared power, misunderstood power  and the cost of carrying it. It asks what it means for a woman to step into a destiny that terrifies the world around her. It asks what sacrifice looks like. It asks what we owe our families, our communities, and ourselves

OLUGBILE’s Sànyà is one of those rare novels that feels at once mythic and intensely personal.

It is a book that reaches deep into Yoruba cosmology but speaks in very contemporary emotional language.

What Olugbile does here is bold: she reimagines a familiar divine archetype the thunderous force associated with Ṣàngó and pours it into the body of a woman, The result is a story that destabilises everything you think you know about myth, gender, and power.

From the beginning, Sànyà is marked by destiny. Her birth carries a prophecy, the kind that simultaneously crowns a person and crushes them under its expectation.

This idea of being born into a role you didn’t choose a saviour, a warrior, an omen becomes one of the novel’s strongest emotional threads. Her journey feels epic, but the epicness never overwhelms the deeply human ache underneath.

There is also grief woven into her foundation. The early death of her mother is not simply a backstory device; it becomes part of the emotional landscape Sànyà must navigate. There is a sense that she is constantly trying to fill an absence the missing mother, the missing normal childhood, the missing freedom that prophecy steals from a young girl.

One of the most compelling narrative  in the book is her relationship with her brother, Dada. It is protective, tender, complicated, and layered with spiritual significance. Both siblings are extraordinary, but in different ways, and Olugbile plays beautifully with that tension: the love between them, the rivalry, the shared destiny, and the diverging paths that power pulls them toward. It’s a relationship that feels both mythic and painfully realistic the kind of sibling bond shaped by circumstance, sacrifice, and destiny.

At the heart of Sànyà is a fierce interrogation of patriarchy. The society she inhabits is one where female power is feared, questioned, or outrightly dismissed.

The fact that Sànyà must masquerade as a man to claim her rightful place is both a narrative twist and a thematic statement. It speaks to how women across cultures have been forced to shrink, hide, or disguise themselves to access what should already belong to them.

Yet the book never becomes didactic. Olugbile keeps the storytelling grounded in emotion and conflict rather than ideology. She uses myth not as an escape from reality but as a mirror held to the realities of being a woman, especially a woman marked as “too powerful,” “too different,” or “too destined.”

What is most impressive is how seamlessly she blends the supernatural with the intimate. The gods, the spiritual realm, the signs and visions all of these feel like extensions of the characters’ inner lives rather than external forces. Destiny is not some faraway cosmic script; it is a weight pressing on Sànyà’s chest, a voice whispering behind her ear, a path she tries to question but cannot fully escape.

Stylistically, the book is rich with Yoruba proverbs, idioms, and oral cadence. The language is clean, vivid, and controlled. Nothing is overwritten. The cultural grounding gives the story texture and authenticity not in a performative way, but as a natural extension of the world the author grew up in.

.Writing Sànyà a female embodiment of a deity traditionally imagined as male is an act of creative rebellion. Not rebellion for shock value, but rebellion for narrative possibility.

The book challenges long-held mythic assumptions without disrespecting tradition; instead, it reinvigorates them.

Sànyà is ultimately a story about power inherited power, feared power, misunderstood power  and the cost of carrying it. It asks what it means for a woman to step into a destiny that terrifies the world around her. It asks what sacrifice looks like. It asks what we owe our families, our communities, and ourselves.

The novel is mythic, but its pains are familiar. It is fantastical, but its emotions are starkly real. What stays with you is not just the magic or the prophecy, but the girl beneath the thunder Sànyà herself: brave, burdened, gifted, flawed, and unforgettable.

• Aysha Abdullahi is founder, Bookbug Nigeria; director of Readbug Children’s Literary Festival; managing director of Karatu Books