Worries of the Heart is not women's history in the conventional sense. Widowhood is a social situation, not a biological identity. Mutongi's focus is on how Maragoli women in Western Kenya shaped their relationships with other people. Through a variety of rhetorical strategies, Maragoli widows have, over the course of Kenya's colonial and postcolonial history, obliged male elders, government officials and other arbiters to treat them mercifully. Widows had once articulated kehenda mwoyo, their ‘worries of the heart’, around their husbands' graves. During colonial times they brought their worries to bear in new venues. In open-air meetings where they poured out their sorrows to their male kin, in the law courts where they pleaded their cases, and in petitions and other documentation, widows emphasized their vulnerability and embarrassed their hearers. By their rhetoric, they led male power-brokers to act in their favour. Mutongi studies the strategic engagements that Maragoli widows made with government institutions, and in so doing she offers an intimate history of women's agency.

This is not an abstract work of legal history. Mutongi's book is in many ways a history of a people, and it bursts with character and life. The book starts by describing the awful series of battles by which British military men subjugated the Maragoli region in the late nineteenth century. War, livestock disease and smallpox unsettled human populations, and left many children fatherless. Some of these orphans attached themselves to the Friends African Mission station in Kaimosi, which was established by American evangelists in 1902. Their mothers thought them to be truants. They loudly poured out their worries, calling on their male relatives to discipline their sons. For their part, widows' wayward sons practised the disciplines of ‘practical Christianity’. Their right-angled houses were testimonies to the Quakerly virtues of sobriety and cleanliness. But in the mid-1930s, Quaker converts' lined-up villages came unstuck, as the economy of gold mining led landholders to consolidate their holdings at dependents' expense. During this era of land consolidation, widows found themselves imperiled. Mutongi uses an extensive series of oral interviews to reconstruct how widows behaved in courts. Women had to be deferential in the litigation of the 1930s, representing themselves in such a way as to prick Maragoli elders' consciences. They had also to guard their reputations outside the courtroom, for, as Mutongi shows, widows' fortunes were always closely allied with their sons' welfare.

During the 1940s a new generation of women found themselves endangered by their husbands. Hundreds of Maragoli men left home to serve in the King's African Rifles, forming hasty marriages with rural women. Mutongi argues that soldiers' unfamiliarity with their wives accounts in part for the moral panic that gripped Western Kenya during and immediately after the war. Maragoli conservatives' public chastisements of urban prostitutes convinced some husbands that their wives needed physical punishment. Women used the courts to defend themselves against husbands' abuse. Mutongi argues that, following a series of reforms, the courts in the 1940s were more able to hear women's voices. Widows used litigation to embarrass sons-in-law who abused their wives, appealing both to British conceptions of justice and to Maragoli ideas about proper masculine conduct.

In a further chapter of political practice, Maragoli widows during the 1960s took up the language of Kenyan citizenship to challenge male relatives' efforts to monopolize their land. Postcolonial Kenya's government promoted land reform as central to its efforts to reform the rural economy. But Maragoli widows found it hard to protect their interests. In the over 200 petitions that Mutongi has unearthed, widows represented themselves to local officials as oppressed citizens. The abstract language of rights got them a hearing in the national arena. But Maragoli widows lost their rhetorical advantage in representing themselves as citizens. Bureaucratic institutions cannot be moved by emotive appeals about honourable conduct, and Mutongi finds Maragoli widows today to be disappointed with their unhearing government.

Mutongi is at her best when comparing the rich collection of court transcripts held at the Kakamega Provincial Record Centre with the hundreds of oral interviews she has done. Her widows are not merely litigants. Because she was able to locate specific Maragoli women who filed court cases and wrote petitions, Mutongi is able to place widows' self-representations within the context of a particular woman's life. Widows are in this account shown to engage with courts strategically, moving in and out of institutional arenas in pursuit of their own goals. But Mutongi's focus on widows' agency makes it hard to study the structures that constrained and governed their lives. This book says nothing about the legal codes by which the courts adjudicated conjugal disputes. Litigation may have been an arena where widows could make allies of sympathetic men. But court work was also structured by a set of criteria that distinguished right action from criminality. Mutongi says nothing about the structure of legal agency. Neither does she cast light on the intellectual and social work by which missionaries and other entrepreneurs standardized, codified and popularized new forms of ‘Maragoli’ culture. Her book commences in the late nineteenth century, and in consequence of this shallow chronology she can do little to contrast older forms of social organization with the novelties that Maragoli people encountered in the twentieth century. Mutongi's history of agency needs to account more fully for colonial power.

A second point of criticism arises from Mutongi's research methodology. This is an inescapably intimate book, for Mutongi grew up within the community about which she writes. The fact that Mutongi has known her interviewees since her childhood allows her to evoke their personalities in a way that other historians cannot. But she sometimes seems to take rather more licence than is appropriate. Some readers will feel uncomfortable with Mutongi's imaginative reconstruction of Maragoli suitors' efforts to circumvent government bridewealth rules (pp. 125–6). Others will criticize the moralism in Mutongi's description of Quaker converts' ‘pettiness’ (p. 80), or in her judgements on one interviewee's scorn for her co-wife (pp. 112–13). Still others will wonder at the absence of a thorough review of the scholarly literature. Mutongi's knowledge of her interviewees' lives greatly enriches the book. But this intimate book would have been more compelling had the author occasionally taken a backwards step.