Even When Your Voice Shakes and the Quiet Rebellion of a Ghanaian Girlhood
In Ruby Yayra Goka’s Even When Your Voice Shakes, a young Ghanaian girl finds her voice in a world designed to keep her silent. This tender yet clear-eyed novel defies its young adult label by confronting, with lyrical gravity, the systems of oppression that entrap the vulnerable, particularly girls, within the folds of familial obligation, cultural expectation, and gendered violence. In doing so, Goka offers a narrative of resistance; a novel that draws power not from heroic flair but from the quiet strength of a girl daring to tell her own story.
Set in Ghana, the novel opens with the protagonist Amerley waking up in a prison cell, an image that is as much literal as it is symbolic. The shackles are physical; concrete, metal, confinement, but they are also social and emotional. Amerley, a teenager from a modest background, stands accused of a crime she cannot remember committing. It is from this moment of bewilderment that Goka begins to unwind a story that is both intimate and indicting, tracing the events that led Amerley from the school classroom to a courtroom.
As the novel unfolds, we are taken into Amerley’s world: the narrow corridors of her childhood, the unspoken grief of her mother’s absence, the economic precarity that haunts her father’s household, and the unsparing weight of being a girl in a society that often treats silence as a virtue in women. Goka writes Amerley not as an archetype, but as a fully-realised individual. Her emotions; fear, confusion, resolve, are rendered with striking empathy. She is at once fiercely intelligent and painfully naïve, her perspective imbued with the contradictions of adolescence in a morally ambiguous adult world.
Goka, a dentist by profession and an award-winning writer of numerous children’s and young adult books, brings to this novel a deep understanding of character and consequence. The prose is spare but evocative, rhythmic without being overly ornamental. There’s a calm steadiness to the writing, which makes the moments of revelation hit harder. Even when the plot edges toward the sensational, a violent crime, betrayal, trauma, the novel remains grounded in psychological realism. It resists melodrama. What Goka is most interested in is not spectacle, but voice: the painful emergence of language in a girl who has long been told her voice doesn’t matter.
The novel’s title, Even When Your Voice Shakes, is a quiet invocation. It suggests both vulnerability and defiance. The idea that speaking even when frightened, even when uncertain, is an act of resistance. Amerley’s journey is not toward perfection or vengeance, but toward articulation. Toward the courage to name what has been done to her, what she has lost, and what she demands from the future. In this way, Goka aligns the novel with a long tradition of feminist literature that values testimony, voice, and self-definition.
But Goka’s feminist politics are not abstract; they are rooted in the texture of Ghanaian life. The novel subtly interrogates class divides, the limitations of legal justice, and the moralistic hypocrisy of institutions meant to protect the young. Amerley’s school, for instance, is less a sanctuary than a space of surveillance. Adults in positions of authority; teachers, police officers, lawyers, oscillate between indifference and coercion. The system does not merely fail girls like Amerley; it often punishes them for surviving.
It is in Amerley’s relationships with other girls and women, however, that the novel finds its heartbeat. There is sisterhood here, and intergenerational memory. There is the warmth of a friend who believes in you, the stern love of a grandmother who knows how the world works, and the solace of those who, even in silence, bear witness. These relationships are drawn with care, never idealised, but always essential. They tether Amerley to the possibility of healing.
Though the novel unfolds chronologically through flashbacks, it reads as a long unburdening. Goka allows us into Amerley’s interiority with such grace that the act of reading begins to feel like listening to a girl piecing together her truth, building it sentence by sentence. In this way, the novel mirrors the emotional architecture of trauma recovery: nonlinear, fragile, and deeply courageous. Amerley does not find peace easily or entirely. What she finds is a beginning. And in that, there is hope.
The literary landscape of Ghanaian fiction is richly populated with stories of return, tradition, and postcolonial negotiation. What distinguishes Even When Your Voice Shakes is its insistence on staying with the overlooked: the girl who does not flee to the West, who does not inherit a family compound, who is not anointed by ancestral wisdom or elite education. Amerley is ordinary, and therein lies the novel’s radical gesture. It asserts that her life, her pain, and her dreams are worthy of the same narrative attention typically reserved for grander tales.
In her debut adult novel, Goka gives us not only a story about voice, but a novel that listens to the silences, the ruptures, the tremors of girlhood in a world too slow to protect. It is a book that lingers after its final sentence, not because it shocks, but because it sings softly, insistently, and with a kind of aching clarity that marks all enduring literature.
Even When Your Voice Shakes is a call to all of us: to hear the stories spoken in faltering tones, to recognise the bravery in vulnerability, and to bear witness even when it hurts. Ruby Yayra Goka has written a novel that matters not only because of what it reveals about Ghanaian society, but because of what it affirms about the human spirit: that even in the face of injustice, the act of telling your story is an act of power.