Funmi Fetto’s Hail Mary – Stories arrives as a fierce, necessary voice in contemporary literary fiction, mapping the emotional cartography of Nigerian womanhood with a clarity that stings and heals. In these ten interconnected but independent stories, Fetto refuses any neat resolution. Instead, she immerses readers into the inner and outer lives of women standing on the cusp of rebellion, reckoning, or reinvention.
Rooted in both the African continent and the Black British experience, Hail Mary doesn’t seek to universalize trauma—it insists on its specificity. And in doing so, it achieves resonance that is quietly radical.
Entering the World of Hail Mary: Ten Stories, Ten Lives, One Pulse
The collection is structured around ten narratives—each orbiting a distinct protagonist, yet all are linked by an invisible thread: the struggle to reconcile identity with inherited silence, duty, faith, or love. Fetto’s terrain is intimate: living rooms, kitchen tables, chapel pews, and cramped London flats. But her themes—betrayal, longing, escape, endurance—are vast.
The women in these stories aren’t heroes or victims. They are complicated, bruised, and brave. They are mothers, daughters, lovers, immigrants, and misfits. And each one, in her own flawed way, is trying to survive systems designed to ignore her voice.
Literary Voice: Quiet Power, Fierce Precision
What makes Funmi Fetto’s fiction so arresting is her ability to balance tenderness and indictment without ever tipping into melodrama. Her prose is compact, vivid, and simmering with subtext. She doesn’t over-write. She trusts the reader to meet her where she is.
In stories like Unspoken and Hail Mary by Funmi Fetto, her sentences unfold like unsent letters—measured, aching, and brimming with emotional restraint. In Underneath the Mango Tree and The Tail of a Small Lizard, she leans into allegory and memory, crafting poetic narratives that feel haunted by untold histories.
Standout Stories: Unfolding the Emotional Core
While each piece in the collection offers something unique, several emerge as particular highlights:
2 Samuel 6:14
An unforgettable opening that explores the grim intersections of evangelical fervor and marital abuse. Ifeoma’s dance of liberation is both literal and metaphorical. The story’s finale is one of the most subversively satisfying in the collection.
Unspoken
Here, we meet Amaka, a woman grappling with an engagement she cannot accept and a childhood she cannot escape. Fetto’s rendering of suppressed trauma is subtle but devastating. Few writers depict internal silence with such exactness.
Housegirl
A commentary on class, domestic servitude, and internalized oppression. The tension between shame and aspiration simmers beneath every sentence.
Dodo is Yoruba for Fried Plantain
Fetto masterfully layers cultural nostalgia with intergenerational misunderstanding. A story that uses food as metaphor and memory, it’s among the most heartwarming yet quietly tragic.
Trip
A travel story that isn’t really about geography, but about emotional borders. This tale explores diaspora disillusionment and the fine line between reinvention and erasure.
Themes: Layered, Local, and Lacerating
Fetto explores a wide spectrum of themes, yet they all revolve around a core inquiry: What does it cost to be a Nigerian woman navigating the expectations of others?
Central Themes Include:
The tyranny of patriarchal faith: Several stories confront the weaponization of religion, especially when wielded by men to subjugate women. Fetto critiques this with razor precision.
Migration and its aftermath: From the loneliness of London to the nostalgia for Nigeria, Fetto probes what it means to belong—or not belong—anywhere.
Family as sanctuary and battleground: Whether through estranged siblings, haunted mothers, or disapproving elders, the stories expose familial love as a source of both comfort and pain.
Body as battleground: Beauty, desire, aging, weight, sexuality—Fetto depicts the female body as a site of cultural scrutiny and personal rebellion.
Silence as survival strategy: Time and again, characters choose silence—not as surrender, but as self-preservation. This motif builds a quiet but resonant rhythm throughout the book.
What Works: The Collection’s Literary Triumphs
Multivocality Without Repetition: Each story stands apart in tone and texture. Though the themes overlap, the voices never blur. Fetto ensures each woman’s story is hers alone.
Emotional Intelligence: Fetto avoids over-explaining trauma. Her strength lies in what’s unsaid—in glances, absences, quiet decisions.
Sociopolitical Sharpness: Through subtle details—a green card lottery, a church sermon, a stolen kiss—Fetto critiques power, faith, and gender without turning her characters into allegories.
Prose that Respects the Reader: Her writing is elegant and intelligent. It trusts the reader to understand subtext, to sit with discomfort, and to feel the pause between sentences.
What Could Be Stronger: A Fair Critique
While Hail Mary by Funmi Fetto is a deeply rewarding read, it does have moments of unevenness:
Some stories feel structurally abrupt. Particularly in the middle of the collection, there are narratives that could benefit from either deeper emotional layering or a more deliberate arc.
The tonal similarity of endings. Several stories end on a reflective note or quiet action, which, when read consecutively, can feel formulaic.
Repetition of the “escape” motif. While migration and exit are recurring ideas, the variations on this theme begin to feel slightly overused by the final third of the book.
These aren’t structural failings so much as signs of a writer exploring a thematic obsession. And for a debut, this level of thematic cohesion is rare and commendable.
Comparisons and Literary Echoes
If you enjoyed Hail Mary by Funmi Fetto, consider:
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi
The Sex Lives of African Women by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Like Fetto, these authors write boldly about African women without romanticization. They treat culture not as backdrop but as an active, sometimes antagonistic force.
About the Author: Funmi Fetto
Before stepping into fiction, Fetto made her mark as a respected journalist, best known for her nonfiction work Palette: The Beauty Bible for Women of Colour. In that book, she redefined the beauty narrative for Black women. In Hail Mary by Funmi Fetto, she does something similar—but with fiction as her tool.
Her nonfiction background gives her writing a grounded clarity. Yet in fiction, she reveals a poetic, layered, and emotionally complex dimension that signals her as a literary voice to watch.
Final Thoughts: A Debut That Dares to Remember
Hail Mary – Stories by Funmi Fetto doesn’t coddle the reader. It doesn’t tidy up its endings. What it offers instead is truth—raw, intimate, sometimes angry, sometimes tender. It’s a book that lingers long after the final page, inviting you to return not for comfort, but for confrontation.
Fetto’s gift lies in her ability to listen—to what her characters don’t say, to what her readers need to hear, and to the echoes of generations of silenced women. With Hail Mary, she gives them voice. Not loud. But unwavering.
Ideal For Readers Who:
Crave emotionally intelligent fiction about women’s inner lives
Appreciate layered, character-driven short stories
Are interested in African, diasporic, or feminist literature
Want stories that are unafraid to make you uncomfortable—in service of truth