If you want to make God laugh by Bianca Marais

Please be aware – there are spoilers in this review/

This book is about how three women’s plans for life were altered beyond recognition and how they coped with this. Told in first person, chapters switch back and forth between narrators. Zodwa is a seventeen-year-old black village girl who is trying to abort her pregnancy as she lives in a squatter camp outside Johannesburg with her mother. Ruth is a rich socialite, watching her marriage disintegrate. Delilah is a former nun working in an orphanage in Ziarre. All three women are tied to each other in the early days of post-apartheid rule in South Africa.

Sisters Ruth and Delilah come back to their childhood home, broken and forlorn, not knowing the other was returning. One day a baby arrives on the porch, and Ruth wants to take him in as her own. Ruth, however, is a white woman living in the middle of an Afrikaner’s society – with them wanting to purchase her property to complete a compound for trophy hunting. Ruth is not cowed by the thugs trying to scare her off, but there are challenges to her unconscious bias from the values her parents instilled.

Delilah, her younger sister, left her home at 18 to be a nun. She left in disgrace, but her family doesn’t know it is because she gave birth to a son and was forced to abandon him. She has spent her life caring for orphans to assuage her guilt.

Zodwa was on the cusp of a new life, looking to build for herself the fortune her brother had made to lead the way out of poverty before he disappeared. She was to follow in his glorified path, but is no longer able to now that she is pregnant. 

Each of these women were shaped by violence inflicted upon them by men. Rape lead to two completed pregnancies and some abortions. But when a child was desired, it was unattainable. The men in power that preyed upon young women were just one more source of shame in South Africa. These women, however, ultimately forgave themselves and found a way to build lives together. While nothing is perfect, it is important to know that these women were strong and never backed down from a fight – be it physical intimidation to sell out and abandon a baby, societal pressure to abandon people with HIV/AIDS, and spiritually holding corrupted priests accountable for abuses against innocent women.