This unassuming novel is something I just found on the bookshelf of Santa Clara University's library. A really good read. Once I got started I just plowed the whole way through to the end. It is written in the form of a series of letters from mother to daughter. While there is much hat-tipping to "Africa" really one has to be extremely clear, the Africa in the book is an extraordinarily well-educated, well-traveled and wealthy African family, albeit with rather normal roots in a village. The setting, Zimbabwe, is an outlier in terms of colonial history.
Mariaire is nowhere near the writer that Doris Lessing is (though she could have been- the bio notes indicate, rather, that she is a doctor and neurosurgeon). While the prose is very good, and the style of letter writing is quite forgiving since meandering is part of the form, the subject matter makes the book complex. At heart it is a serious attempt to construct an identity. And this is where the reader (me) gets a little nervous, because I can't figure out whether Mariaire is a novelist, and is trying out what it would be like for someone to construct this particular identity, or whether Mariaire herself is constructing the identity. The reason for nervousness is that it isn't really a very interesting identity to construct... the reflections of the identity-former and the narrator never really transcend, they stay very simple. Like a knee-jerk to various stimuli. It is useful to contrast with Chimananda Ngozi Adichi...
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