The lives of three black women in Sweden all intersect with the same influential white man - Kemi is head-hunted to work for his company, Brittany-Rae becomes the object of his romantic obsession, Muna finds a job as a cleaner in his company offices.

This novel had such promise - I was looking forward to a dissection of racism and Swedish society through the varied experiences of three very different women, and I think some of it was based on Åkerström’s own experiences. But it was completely let down by the writing, which was painfully cliché, overly descriptive and…boring, plus the first third or so of Brittany-Rae’s storyline read like a (terrible) romance novel. Novels about racism don’t have to be a serious literary trauma-fest, and I appreciate Åkerström’s attempt at a more lighthearted approach, but I draw the line at the use of the phrase “making lemonade out of life’s lemons” without irony by a character that doesn’t even speak English. I also want characters to be believable, but the three women were so generic that they were rendered uninteresting. I suffered through 200 pages before realising I was only halfway through, just couldn’t deal with the writing anymore and finally DNFed. I flicked through the rest of the book, and towards the end it does eventually touch on some important issues - including the fetishisation of black female bodies, levels of acceptance (or not) of immigrants and refugees in Sweden and a brief but fascinating anecdote around the treatment by shop assistants of a black woman struggling to speak Swedish vs speaking English with a US accent. It’s such a shame that it took so long to get there after so much unnecessary faffing around. I also didn’t love that the three storylines’ common denominator was a rich white man, as it ultimately centred him and detracted slightly from the women. An intriguing premise, but bogged down by the writing and took so long to actually get to any promised insights on racism in a Swedish context that I lost the will to continue reading.