A Literary Review of 40by40 (40 Things I Wish I Did More Before 40)
by Natasha Amadi
Published by Elsiewrite Limited, 2026
ISBN: 978-978-62214-1-0
Reviewed by Mr. Bassa Shiwaye Yakura
Senior Lecturer in General Studies, Federal College of Education, Yola, Adamawa State
There is a particular kind of honesty that does not shout. It arrives quietly, the way a wise elder speaks at dusk — not to impress, but to illuminate. That is precisely the quality one encounters when opening Natasha Amadi’s 40by40: 40 Things I Wish I Did More Before 40. Within the first few pages, before the formal chapters even begin, I found myself pausing. Not because the writing was dense or difficult, but because it was remarkably, disarmingly true. And truth, when it is delivered with grace, has a way of stopping you still.
I have spent over two decades in the lecture hall, grappling with texts, guiding students through the contours of language, thought, and life. I have read many books that claim to speak to the human experience. Fewer actually do. This one does.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE WORK
Natasha Amadi is a communications professional and public figure who has spent nearly two decades in public relations and strategic communication. She is not primarily known as a literary author in the conventional sense — and yet 40by40 reveals a writer of considerable instinct and emotional intelligence. The book arrives in 2026, published by Elsiewrite Limited, and already it reads like something distilled from many years of lived experience rather than assembled from hours of research alone.
The full title — 40 Things I Wish I Did More Before 40 — is both the premise and the emotional pulse of the entire work. Rather than framing forty as a crisis, a closing chapter, or a deadline, Amadi reframes it as a threshold — a deliberate pause before continuing the journey with greater clarity. The book is anchored in what she calls the TAP framework: Think. Act. Progress. Each chapter interrogates a different life pillar — faith, health, finances, love, career, relationships, creativity, travel — and offers not a checklist, but a confession. A reckoning. An invitation.

THE NATURE OF THE TEXT: A LITERARY MEMOIR
Let me be precise about what kind of book this is, because it matters enormously for how one reads it. 40by40 is not, at its heart, a self-help manual. It is a literary memoir — structured, yes, around practical pillars, but driven by personal voice, lived experience, and the kind of reflective prose that characterises memoir as a form. It belongs on the same shelf as books that dare to say, in the first person, this is what I have lived, and here is what I have learned from it.
Amadi is acutely aware of this. Her dedication page reads: “To the woman I was, the woman I am, and the woman I am becoming.” That single line is the thesis of everything that follows. This is a book in which the author is simultaneously subject, narrator, and witness. She looks back on her own journey not with regret but with what she describes as “gratitude and grace” — and that dual posture, honest yet generous, is what lifts the writing above the genre of simple advice literature.
In my years of teaching General Studies, I have often told students that the most powerful texts are those that dare to be personal while remaining universal. Amadi achieves precisely this. Her story is her own, yet it names experiences that readers across gender, class, and even culture will recognise with something close to relief — the relief of finally seeing one’s private struggles put into clean, courageous language.

THEMATIC DEPTH: WHAT THE BOOK IS REALLY ABOUT
On the surface, 40by40 is organised around ten life pillars across fourteen chapters. But beneath that architecture, the book carries several deeply human themes that merit examination.
Faith as Foundation. The chapter on faith is one of the most vulnerable in the book. Amadi does not preach; she testifies. She shares how she once treated faith like a parachute — something to grab in freefall rather than wear as a daily garment. Her candid admission that she engaged with God “like a rescue plan” rather than a relationship is both self-aware and quietly courageous. In a Nigerian context, where faith is often performed more than examined, this honesty is genuinely subversive. She opens the chapter with Matthew 6:33, and throughout, her faith is not used to silence doubt but to survive it.
Identity and Womanhood. Woven through nearly every chapter is a meditation on what it means to be a woman navigating modern life — particularly a Nigerian woman who is simultaneously a professional, a mother, a wife, a daughter, and a seeker. Amadi does not frame womanhood as a burden, but neither does she pretend it is frictionless. In the chapter on Health and Wellbeing, she shares how her body image and self-perception shifted significantly after the birth of her second child. The moment when she realised that her confidence was slipping is rendered with uncommon tenderness. It is the kind of passage that would move a reader to tears not because it is dramatic, but because it is true.
Resilience and the Art of Becoming. Perhaps the most enduring theme of the memoir is resilience — not the performative kind that social media celebrates, but the quieter kind that involves showing up to one’s own life with intention, even when no one is watching and no one applauds. In the chapter on Personal Growth and Development, Amadi writes about pursuing an MBA while balancing work, family, ministry, and school. She describes travelling to another town for lectures and exams, and seeing this not as a burden but as “a seed and a commitment” to her future self. That reframing — burden as blessing, exhaustion as investment — is the philosophical backbone of the entire book.
Joy, Love, and the Permission to Feel. In a culture that often equates productivity with worth, Amadi’s chapters on Joyful Living and Love feel almost radical. She argues, gently but firmly, that joy is not earned through achievement — it is chosen daily. “I choose joy every single day,” reads one of her Confessions of More in Motion passages. “Joy is my birthright, and I claim it with unwavering intention.” These declarations, written in italics and designed to be spoken aloud, give the book an almost liturgical quality. They are not slogans; they are vows.
Purpose, Legacy, and the Milestone. Chapter 12, More Than a Milestone, is the philosophical heart of the book. Here, Amadi maps out each decade — twenties as foundation, thirties as direction, forties as refinement — and argues that milestone ages are not deadlines but “deliberate pauses.” The question she poses, what is unfolding in me right now, and how can I engage fully in this season of my life, is the kind of question a good teacher asks a student at the beginning of a semester. It is clarifying. It is generous. It refuses to rush.

NARRATIVE STYLE AND LANGUAGE
Amadi writes in a voice that is warm without being saccharine, frank without being harsh. Her prose is conversational but never careless. She has the communicator’s gift for knowing when to deploy a scripture, when to share a personal anecdote, and when to simply let a sentence breathe.
She uses several literary devices with skill. The drop caps that open each chapter are a typographical gesture toward the classical tradition of illuminated manuscripts — a subtle signal that this is meant to be read with care. Each chapter is framed by a biblical epigraph, giving the book an architectural quality, as if the scriptures are load-bearing walls on which personal story is hung.
Her best writing arrives in moments of personal revelation. In the Love chapter, she writes of giving love “without holding back,” and then acknowledges with clear-eyed honesty that the way one loves is not always the way one is loved in return. “The love you pour out like an open river,” she observes, “is sometimes met with a trickle.” That image — quiet, precise, slightly heartbreaking — is the work of someone who has truly learned to write.
The Travel chapter is a delightful surprise: it begins with vivid, playful fantasy — Amadi imagining herself on a beach in the Seychelles, wearing a gorgeous bikini, reclining like a queen — before pivoting to the serious point that adventure enlarges who we are. The tonal shift is managed with ease, which speaks well of her range as a writer.
What I find most impressive, as an educator who has spent years distinguishing between writing that performs depth and writing that actually possesses it, is that Amadi’s prose earns its insights. She does not arrive at conclusions; she walks toward them, and invites the reader to walk alongside her.

STRUCTURE AND THE CONCEPT OF 40 BY 40
The architecture of 40by40 is elegant and purposeful. The book is divided into a foreword, acknowledgements, an emergence section, a preface, fourteen chapters, a bonus chapter, and a concluding call to action. Each chapter on the ten life pillars includes four “I Wish I” reflective prompts, a TAP framework (Think, Act, Progress), and a Confession of More in Motion — a bold, first-person declaration meant to be spoken as an affirmation.
This structure serves the memoir’s dual ambition admirably. On one level, it is deeply personal — the author’s own story, told with vulnerability and wit. On another level, it is generously practical — it gives the reader tools to act on what the story has stirred. The transition from reflection to action, within the same chapter, is handled without clumsiness, which is harder to achieve than it sounds.
The Preface explains the book’s architecture with unusual clarity. Amadi positions Chapter 1 — The Science Behind Milestone Ages — as intellectual grounding, drawing on behavioural research about temporal landmarks. This is a smart move. It lends the memoir a degree of scholarly credibility while also affirming what most thoughtful people already sense: that certain ages feel like doors, not merely numbers.
The Bonus Chapter — 40 Ingredients to a Life of More — is a highlight. Forty short, frank wisdoms, written in the first person, ranging from the spiritual to the practical. Amadi is honest enough to admit that she still needs some of these herself. That admission transforms the list from prescription to conversation.

CULTURAL AND SOCIAL RESONANCE
For a Nigerian reader — and, I would argue, for any reader from the African continent — 40by40 resonates in ways that are both familiar and quietly challenging.
The Nigerian woman’s experience of turning forty is often fraught with social expectation. Society measures her by what she has accumulated — a husband, children, a career, a house — and says little about who she has become. Amadi does not directly confront this pressure, but her entire book is an implicit argument against it. By centring interiority over achievement, becoming over having, and purpose over performance, she writes a counter-narrative that is both culturally specific and universally needed.
Her chapter on Finances is notable in this context. Financial literacy and freedom are rarely discussed openly by Nigerian women in public writing. Amadi addresses this with directness, framing financial intentionality not as a luxury but as a pillar of dignity and self-determination. In a society where women’s financial lives are often managed by or dependent on men, this chapter is quietly radical.
The Faith chapter, similarly, navigates Nigerian Christian culture with intelligence. She is devout without being doctrinaire, and she manages to speak about her relationship with God without alienating readers who may hold different beliefs or none at all. That is a delicate balance, and she maintains it throughout.
The book would, I think, have benefited from even more explicit engagement with the Nigerian social context — the weight of family expectations, the particular loneliness of ambitious women in patriarchal structures, the economics of self-development for those without disposable income. These are absences, not failures. But they are worth naming, because they represent the terrain the book circles without fully entering.

CRITICAL EVALUATION
Let me turn, as any honest reviewer must, to both the strengths and the limitations of the work.
Strengths. The book’s greatest strength is its emotional authenticity. Amadi never speaks from a position of arrival; she speaks as someone still on the road. This humility makes the writing trustworthy. A second strength is its structural ingenuity — the TAP framework and the Confessions give each chapter a rhythm that prevents the book from becoming merely anecdotal. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Amadi writes with genuine literary craft. Her images are precise, her voice is consistent, and her tone is one that invites rather than instructs.
Originality. In a crowded market of self-help and inspirational literature, 40by40 stands apart primarily because it is honest about its own incompleteness. Amadi does not claim to have all forty things mastered. She writes, of the Bonus Chapter, that she “still needs it too.” That self-implication — the author as fellow traveller, not finished product — is the most original gesture in the book.
Limitations. A critical eye will notice that some chapters feel more fully realised than others. The chapters on Faith, Personal Growth, and Love are rich and sustained. A few of the shorter chapters, such as Creativity and Fun, feel somewhat compressed, as if the author had more to say but constrained herself for balance. The book’s greatest literary risk — its aspirational, declaration-style Confessions — occasionally drift toward motivational poster language, which slightly undercuts the nuanced voice established elsewhere. These are minor concerns in a work of this ambition and heart, but a more rigorous editorial hand might have deepened certain sections further.

EMOTIONAL IMPACT AND READER CONNECTION
I want to say something about what this book does to a reader, because literary reviews sometimes forget to account for feeling.
40by40 is the kind of book that makes you put it down and look at your own life. Not with despair, but with a renewed attention. I found myself, while reading the chapter on Personal Growth, thinking about the books I have assigned to students over the years and wondering whether I have also been reading — truly reading — with the hunger Amadi describes. I thought about the seeds I, too, may have left unplanted.
This is the mark of a memoir that works: it does not merely tell you the author’s story. It turns the mirror gently toward you.
For younger readers — women in their twenties and thirties, students at the beginning of their adult lives — this book will feel like wisdom borrowed from a trusted older sister or mentor. For readers in their forties and beyond, it will feel like recognition: the bittersweet pleasure of seeing your own journey reflected back with clarity and compassion. For men, too, the book speaks — because the questions of faith, purpose, identity, and intentional living are not gendered questions. They are human ones.

CONCLUSION: A BOOK WORTH READING CAREFULLY
In the classroom, I tell my students that the best texts are those that do two things simultaneously: they tell you something true about another person’s life, and they show you something true about your own. By that measure, Natasha Amadi’s 40by40 is a genuinely good book.
It is not a perfect book. It has moments where the practical scaffolding feels more prominent than the literary voice, and one wishes, occasionally, for a longer pause in the places where the author has the most to give. But it is a deeply honest, intelligently structured, and warmly written memoir — one that earns the emotion it asks you to feel.
The book’s full subtitle — 40 Things I Wish I Did More Before 40 — is both humble and brave. Humble, because it admits incompleteness. Brave, because it chooses to share that incompleteness publicly, in the hope that someone else might learn from it without having to live through it.
I would recommend 40by40 to: women navigating their twenties, thirties, and forties who are searching for a language for their own becoming; young people at universities and colleges who are beginning to make the decisions that will shape the rest of their lives; educators who wish to spark genuine self-reflection in their students; anyone who has ever looked at a milestone birthday and asked, quietly, is this who I meant to become?
Natasha Amadi has written a book she says she needed first. That, in my experience, is always the surest sign that a book will be needed by many others too.
Live. Grow. Thrive. Become. Those are the four words she places at the centre of her work. They are simple words. But the best things often are.

Mr. Bassa Shiwaye Yakura
Senior Lecturer, General Studies
Federal College of Education, Yola, Adamawa State
April 2026