BN Book Review: Your Twinkling Eyes by Adedoyin Ayeni | Review by Roseline Mgbodichinma

There is a particular brand of frustration that comes from being close to someone without ever being truly chosen by them. You talk all the time. You know each other well. You are the safe, convenient place they return to after every outburst, just not their priority. This emotional bind sits at the heart of Your Twinkling Eyes, a young adult romance novel by Adedoyin Ayeni. Anyone who has ever loved a best friend who refused to love them back will find something uncomfortably familiar here.

Across roughly 250 pages, Ayeni works through the well-worn territory of bad boy lore and the friends-to-lovers trope: the emotionally unavailable boy whose controlling jealousy gets mistaken for love. What makes her approach worth noting is not that she sets out to dismantle any of this, but that she writes so honestly from inside it.

Your Twinkling Eyes is a feel-good read in the loosest sense. It is immersive, emotionally resonant, and often frustrating in the way young love usually is. If you want a clear sense of how Nigerian teenagers and young adults talk, flirt, argue, apologise, spiral, and survive the pressure of their becoming, this book offers a familiar and engaging window. It is also easy to imagine on screen, with relatable and often cheesy dialogue, recognisable settings, and sensual tension between the characters.

The novel is largely about a specific group of young people, ambitious, academically gifted teenagers navigating Lagos with different levels of financial security. These are students attending tutorial centres, preparing for JAMB, moving between mainland estates and island homes, already aware that their futures depend on grades, access, and timing. Romance here exists alongside class anxiety, parental expectations, and the constant pressure to get things right, often in the middle of very avoidable mistakes.

That context sharpens the stakes of the central relationship between Tami and Derin. Tami’s world is one where every exam is a serious affair, and every distraction has its consequences. Derin moves as though his mistakes are easier to recover from. Even when the book does not spell this out directly, the imbalance is present in how freely each character moves through the chaos and normalcy of their lives. Ayeni trusts the reader to notice who has room to stumble and who does not.

Her writing mirrors that trust. Your Twinkling Eyes reads like oral storytelling; the prose is simple, the sentences are easy to understand, and the descriptions are succinct. It has the feel of a group chat gist narrated among friends. Ayeni seems less interested in decorative language than in the relatability of things, writing in a rhythm that shows how her characters actually speak and think in real life.

In the novel, the scenes are often long and emotionally dense, and there is a recursiveness to the pacing that some readers will recognise as true to life, while others may find it overflogged. Younger readers, especially, are likely to find this closeness to real interaction part of the appeal.

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as ordinary teenage drama, but the emotional confusion defining Tami and Derin’s relationship mirrors dynamics that shape modern adult dating, too, where ambiguity has become the norm. New love interests, Sayo and Charles, complicate things further, and the novel ends up being as much about how early power dynamics transition into adulthood as it is about adolescence itself.

Throughout Your Twinkling Eyes, Ayeni maps the tensions of young love through repetition and delay. The opening chapters establish a pattern of emotional closeness without commitment, late-night calls, private rituals, and a best-friend intimacy that excludes everyone else. As the story progresses, this dynamic is complicated by breakups, rebounds, social media visibility, and the pressure to appear unbothered while being deeply affected. In the latter half of the novel, the tension shifts toward choice, whether to remain loyal to a bond that offers comfort but no certainty, or to risk rupture by wanting more. These unresolved pressures give the novel its emotional momentum. 

Ayeni is especially good at letting readers see Tami’s hurt before Tami herself is ready to admit it. She does not rush her characters into emotional clarity. Instead, they circle their feelings, telling themselves familiar stories about patience, loyalty, and not wanting to spoil what they already have. At one point, the narrator asks herself, “What if he never sees me the way I see him?” It is a question that shadows the novel and gives credence to many of its most affecting moments.

Secondary characters do important work here. Tami’s friends often see what she cannot or will not name, and their conversations provide moments of clarity, humour, and necessary interruption. Ayeni uses them to widen the emotional lens, reminding readers that Tami is not alone even when she feels stuck.

Lagos functions almost as a character in its own right. The author names and describes places, habits, class, people and things with the confidence of someone writing from inside a world she knows very well, and the city comes alive in the details: mainland bustle, island affluence, church programmes, social media, campus life. It is all just there in the storytelling.

She paints a picture of class differences and does not make it forcefully didactic in any way. She allows these distinctions to flow through the characters’ behaviours as they are, without judging their lifestyle or outcomes.

Adedoyin Ayeni captures the smaller frictions of modern romance, from misread messages and delayed replies to the public visibility of relationships online, bringing a web of emotional and romantic dynamism vividly to life. While several major confrontations escalate rapidly and resolve with a neatness that can flatten their emotional complexity, this approach aligns with the novel’s generic commitments. Your Twinkling Eyes is invested in emotional payoff, and in that respect, it succeeds.

One of the book’s most refreshing qualities is how it treats female desire. Tami is not painted as a character who is ashamed of wanting love or physical touch. Her conflict lies in wanting more than the role she has been assigned, and Ayeni treats that longing with seriousness and care, without mocking or punishing her protagonist for feeling deeply.

Adedoyin Ayeni is a creative writer and storyteller whose work spans fiction, devotionals, and digital storytelling, and this range shows in the novel’s structure and style. There is a confessional sense to the voice, something that rids it of all performances, and I find it very moving. 

Taken as a whole, Your Twinkling Eyes is an earnest addition to contemporary Nigerian romance. A tighter edit might sharpen certain arcs, but the book’s fullness has its own appeal. The author’s greatest strengths lie in accessibility, tone, her ear for young voices, and her ability to balance sweetness with enough tension to keep the plot from tipping into pure sentimentality. The extra conversations, repeated arguments, and emotional detours all contribute to the sense of having spent real time with these young, messy characters.

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