‘Sweet Sixteen’ is a very engaging novella with multiple themes such as the challenges facing young adult girls as they grow from childhood age of 12 to 16 onward, boarding school life, religious intolerance and tolerance, and hardships faced by orphans in school, etc. Aliya Bello the central character of the story receives a letter from her father on her sixteenth birthday celebration. Through the letter she recollects a lot of things she had discussed with him.
Hence, the novella is segmented into seven focal topics such as ‘The Letter’, ‘The Drive’, ‘Work’, ‘The Gandhi Test’, ‘Dating’, ‘Stereotype’, and ‘Beauty’. Some societal issues the author highlight includes religious discrimination, bleaching of skin by some Africans, penchant for short cuts to success by some folks in the world, examination malpractices, promotion of pornography among young adults by Netflix streaming of sex videos online, unpalatable use of acronyms mostly used to write or send short messages (SMS) by some people, and how ladies like to be treated, etc. It is a bildungsroman and didactic novella written with a ‘First Person Point of View’ narrative style, as Aliya tells the story of her upbringing and relationship with her father, which borders on the ‘Electra complex’ type.
Aliya shows herself as a hardworking student who does not depend on short cuts to academic success. She works diligently and improves on her previous grade “C” in Chemistry to grade �.