Anjola needs help dressing for a party. Her older sister, Sola, is happy to oblige, though the assistance comes with questions. Whose party? Why does she care so much about looking good? Anjola's explanation becomes increasingly uncomfortable: Neil is giving his girlfriend a surprise birthday party, and she wants to be there as a supportive friend.

Sola is unconvinced. So is Marquise, whose company adds another pair of assessing eyes to the preparations. Anjola insists that friendship is the relevant word. The more she repeats it, the more visible everything she hopes to keep out of the conversation becomes.

This is an appealing way into Tolani Akinola's Leave Your Mess at Home: a reunion conducted through clothes, teasing, and an attraction Anjola keeps trying to describe as friendship. The public opening preview makes the scene funny without removing its discomfort. Being known by your sister can be a pleasure and a considerable inconvenience.

Sola, meanwhile, has difficulties that a confident entrance does not disclose. The reader is about to discover how different the same meeting can feel to the people taking part.

A reunion before the family reunion

The publisher's introduction sets out the larger situation. Sola, the eldest of four adult children in a Nigerian immigrant family, has quietly returned to Chicago after a decade away. Her life as a Los Angeles influencer and her relationship have unravelled. She would like to put things back together before everyone knows what has happened.

Her siblings have their own immediate concerns. Anjola is a doctor in love with her best friend. Karen, the youngest, is still at college and struggling with sexuality and self-image. Ola, the only son and a parental favourite, is about to become a father while questioning his marriage and what raising a Black son in America might involve.

These descriptions establish a family without giving everyone the same problem. The person who leaves, the person who keeps calling, and the person held up as a success may inherit quite different versions of the household. A shared childhood does not guarantee a shared account of it.

The opening makes that difference tangible. Anjola has continued to hope for her sister's presence despite missed visits and disappointments. Seeing Sola brings nervous excitement. When the perspective shifts, Sola feels a familiar numbness, despite having hoped the reunion might make her feel something more.

There is no need to declare one sister insincere. Their uneven investment is the substance of the relationship. Anjola's eagerness cannot produce an equal feeling in Sola, and Sola's apparent ease conceals an emotional absence she finds difficult to explain.

In Claire Bone's interview for the American Booksellers Association's BookWeb, Akinola says the novel began with Anjola and Neil. Exploring the way Anjola loved, and denied herself love, required understanding the family she came from. The siblings entered the story with lives of their own. That account of the writing process helps explain why a romantic difficulty opens onto so much else.

The wrong kind of success

Anjola's medical career provides the excerpt's sharpest complication. After graduating from Yale, she chooses a Chicago public hospital for her residency. She wants to work where she can do the most good. Her mother hears something bewildering: with excellent scores and such a degree, why choose a less prestigious path?

The disagreement is partly about what an achievement is for. A qualification can promise access, standing, and security. It can also make possible a form of work whose value is less easily displayed to relatives. Mother and daughter do not assign the same weight to these rewards.

Yet Anjola's choice does not become a convenient demonstration that she knows herself better than her family does. Several exhausting months into the residency, she wonders whether she came back from genuine desire or from a peculiar sense of moral obligation. Her mother's warning about the work has not proved entirely misplaced.

This hesitation makes the scene more alive. Anjola can sincerely want to help people and still discover that wanting to be good has crowded out other wants. She is trying to distinguish a chosen life from one that merely seems defensible. Defying a parent can leave that question unresolved.

The connection with the party is subtle but persuasive. In both situations, she has an explanation ready: she wants to help, she wants to support a friend. Neither explanation is necessarily false. Neither accounts for everything.

That gives the family story an interest beyond who finally stands up to whom. Someone can produce an impressive account of her conduct while still struggling to say what she wants from it.

What mess does—and does not—mean

Speaking to Praise Okeoghene Vandeh in Brittle Paper, Akinola recalls liking the word “mess” when discussing possible titles but resisting an automatic apology for it. The pressure to appear composed can become especially acute for immigrants who feel that success must justify their presence.

The title gives the characters room to fall below expectations. It does not erase the difference between embarrassing one's family and injuring another person. Akinola also tells Vandeh that genuine love requires accountability, or at least cannot keep trying to evade it.

Keeping those distinctions available matters here. The siblings' difficulties are not interchangeable simply because all four can be called messy. A failed relationship, a desire someone fears admitting, and an action that harms another person make different demands on the people involved.

The promised Thanksgiving gathering brings their separate situations to one table. Its consequences belong to the novel, but the setup supplies a strong expectation: people who have been living with partial information will have to encounter one another in the same room.

Akinola tells Bone that revision helped her make the connections between the siblings more visible. The close third-person perspectives allow the reader to inhabit one life, then discover how much that person's understanding leaves out. Changing viewpoint can complicate a judgment without requiring affection for every character.

Henry Hicks IV's review in The Brooklyn Rail finds the search for home especially affecting. He understands it as a search for relationships in which someone can feel held and find rest, rather than simply a return to a childhood address. This is his reading of the complete novel; it offers a useful possibility to carry into the opening, where being back in Chicago has settled very little.

Humour with something underneath

The preparations for the party establish a lively rhythm, but familiarity also gives people accurate knowledge of where to press. A joke can contain affection, irritation, and an unwanted resemblance to a parent. The opening's pleasures come from hearing these things happen together.

Kirkus's review describes a slow start followed by stronger momentum, with some soap-operatic plotlines balanced by sensitive characterization, realistic dialogue, and humour. That assessment of the whole book suggests a family novel comfortable with conspicuous events as well as private reflection.

Its 384 pages offer room for readers who enjoy following several imperfect adults into one another's lives. Someone seeking a uniformly restrained narrative may find the promised collisions too emphatic. The excerpt provides a better test than the broad label of a dysfunctional family: does Anjola's anxious insistence on friendship make you want to stay with her?

By the time she is dressed, her appearance seems more assured than her account of the evening ahead. Sola has helped her look ready. Whether either sister feels ready to meet the people she needs is another matter. That is where this homecoming begins.