Grace Grandi’s The Beast of Green Manor is loud, sometimes excessive, often funny, and always heartfelt. But in its melodrama lies its truth: families fight loudly, survival isn’t quiet, and forgiveness isn’t neat.
By Mary Chiney
Every family saga begins with a wound. Sometimes it’s financial, sometimes emotional, but always it’s handed down like an heirloom nobody asked for. Grace Grandi’s new novel, The Beast of Green Manor, takes such a wound, the collapse of a once-proud shipping family, the De-Laurents, and threads it through a story of romance, rivalry, and the uneasy work of forgiveness.
Grandi, whose full name is Nnamani Grace Odi, was born on May 9, 2001, in Lagos, Nigeria. She studied at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), a distance-learning institution that rewards independence, and she has worked not only as a novelist but also as a scriptwriter and director.
To her growing readership, she is simply Grandi, a pen name under which she has built a following on platforms like AlphaNovel, where serialized fiction is consumed in weekly bursts. That background matters: her chapters carry the pace and cliff-edge suspense of a digital serial, but her ambitions stretch toward something older, the family novel that remembers its ghosts.
From the first scene, Grandi signals that this will not be a fairy tale in which a prince arrives in a carriage. Instead, she gives us carpentry. “The clang of hammer against nail echoed through Ontario’s bustling market square, sharp and rhythmic like a heartbeat,” The Beast of Green Manor begins.
In that clang, we meet Eleanor “Ellie” De-Laurent, thirty-one, carpenter, caretaker, reluctant matriarch. Her description is more practical than pretty: “Her hair, deep red, too stubborn to stay pinned, glowed under the sun; her hands were nicked, calloused, sure.” When a man mutters, “Never seen a woman split a beam like that,” Ellie snaps back: “Then you haven’t met the right kind of woman”.
It’s a fitting entrance for an author carving her own space in a crowded literary marketplace. Like her heroine, Grandi refuses to shrink into a mold. But Ellie’s strength grows out of loss. Her father, betrayed in business by the Greens, dies in what she insists was not an accident: “The crash didn’t kill him. The deal did.” Her mother follows soon after, leaving Ellie to raise her siblings in a house that “reeked of the wet wall” after rain.
Then comes the rupture. Her younger brother, Samuel, confesses, almost blurts: “I got someone pregnant.” When pressed, he admits: “Valentina Green.” Eleanor’s fury is volcanic: “No, not same Green family I know, right?… Tell me you’re not that stupid.” It’s a line that captures Grandi’s knack for plain speech delivered like a slap.
If Eleanor is survival embodied, Marcus Green, Valentina’s older brother and CEO of Sea Green Logistics, is control incarnate. He is introduced in a boardroom, dismantling subordinates with surgical precision. “Explain this dip”, he demands of one director. When told of an unexpected strike, he replies, “If it was unexpected, our models failed. If you expected it, you failed. Which is it, Mr. Chen?” Another whispers a suggestion, only to be cut off: “Is something unclear?… Then I suggest you save your commentary for group chats. Not my meetings.”
This is the “beast” of the title: ruthless, calculating, nicknamed “The Shark in a Suit.” And yet Grandi doesn’t leave him as a caricature. His chill is armor, forged in a childhood marked by the early loss of both parents and the crushing weight of an empire to maintain. To Eleanor, he embodies everything unforgivable. To readers, he’s more complicated: the product of a system that values power above tenderness.
The clash between Eleanor and Marcus is inevitable, but Grandi draws it out. This is enemies-to-lovers with patience. Attraction simmers beneath disdain, and when intimacy finally erupts, Eleanor insists on an almost unromantic term: “Marriage, but no physical intimacy.”
It’s an odd gambit, and that’s why it works. Instead of rushing into passion, Grandi turns the novel into a meditation on trust and vulnerability. What does it mean to share a house with someone you cannot forgive? To build a life with the enemy of your family? In the uneasy coexistence that follows, Eleanor begins to see “cracks in Marcus’s icy exterior,” and Marcus finds himself drawn to the one woman who refuses to cower.
One of the pleasures of The Beast of Green Manor is its noisy ensemble. Grandi rarely leaves her lovers alone. Around them whirl siblings and elders: Samuel, reckless and earnest; Martha, with her wide-eyed swooning; Esther, unfiltered and comic; Valentina, fragile and tragic; Marcus’s brothers Steve and Daniel, both foils; and Grandma Green, the matriarch whose silence weighs heavier than Marcus’s bark.
Martha, for example, gushes about Marcus on TV: “He had this deep navy-blue suit and this broody, I-own-everything expression. And his jaw? Sharp enough to cut through frozen butter.” Eleanor, scandalised, replies: “Really, Martha? That’s what you’re adding right now? The man who nearly ruined our lives is hot on television?” And then there’s Esther, blurting during Samuel’s confession: “I hope it wasn’t on a velvet sofa.”
These interruptions matter. They break the tension with humour and remind us that families never move in neat, solemn lines. Someone is always undercutting the drama.
Make no mistake: The Beast of Green Manor is a melodramatic book. Eleanor clings to a repossessed couch, shouting, “This house is ours! It’s all we have!” Marcus storms through boardrooms like a tyrant king. And yet, melodrama here isn’t a flaw. It’s a choice. Grandi writes as though survival itself is theatrical, and honestly, when eviction looms, who among us wouldn’t cry louder than we meant to?
Her background in serialised fiction and screenwriting is obvious. Chapters end on cliffhangers. Arguments escalate like scenes staged for maximum effect. But the style suits the subject: families on the edge rarely speak in tidy aphorisms; they slam doors, they say too much, they laugh when they shouldn’t.
For all its romance scaffolding, The Beast of Green Manor is also a social novel. Like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) or Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), it treats marriage as a negotiation of pride, property, and survival. Eleanor doesn’t argue with Marcus only over desire; she fights for her siblings’ security, her father’s memory, and her family’s dignity.
That universality is part of The Beast of Green Manor’s pull. Though set in Ontario, it reflects Grandi’s global perspective. The divide between generational wealth and generational survival is not a Canadian problem or a Nigerian one. It is everywhere.
The Beast of Green Manor bends toward rupture. Betrayal drives Eleanor away; she disappears with her child. Years later, Marcus must find her again, not as a corporate shark but as a man who has learned patience. Their reconciliation is scarred, imperfect, but that’s what makes it moving. “Forgiveness,” the book suggests, “is the fiercest act of survival.”
It’s tempting to keep the author and heroine apart, but the parallels are striking. Just as Eleanor refuses to let her family collapse, Grandi has carved a space for herself in an industry where young Nigerian women rarely find an easy path in commercial fiction. Writing under a pen name, she’s still rooted in her own identity: a student of NOUN, a writer who learned to manage her own education, a storyteller who splits her time between fiction, scripts, and direction.
The immediacy of her dialogue reflects her digital roots. The ensemble chaos reflects a director’s eye. And the persistence of Eleanor mirrors her own: stubborn, determined, unwilling to yield.
What lingers after the last page isn’t just Eleanor and Marcus’s crackling chemistry, though their quarrels and reconciliations burn brightly. What remains is the stubbornness of love itself: love of siblings, despite recklessness; love of enemies, despite history; love of family, despite betrayal.
Grandi’s The Beast of Green Manor is loud, sometimes excessive, often funny, and always heartfelt. But in its melodrama lies its truth: families fight loudly, survival isn’t quiet, and forgiveness isn’t neat. To read The Beast of Green Manor is to be reminded that the people we resist most fiercely may also be the ones who finally force us to see ourselves.
For readers, the book offers a stormy tale of inheritance and desire. For Grandi, it’s something more: a statement of intent from a young Nigerian author determined to prove that romance, family drama, and social critique can all fit under one roof, and that the roof will hold.
Mary Chiney is a culture journalist and alumna of the prestigious University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She covers entertainment and business related topics.