The novel is about a young girl, Darling and it is set in Zimbabwe for about a third of the story and then it moves to Detroit, where Darling emigrates to pursue the American Dream. At the beginning of the book I am struck by what Zades Mda complains about in his memoir, 'Sometimes There is a Void'--is it entirely necessary to portray African nations and African life in a uniformly negative light? Is that a fair representation? I really don't know the answer to that, and Mda himself says no, that it isn't at all balanced, but that is what we have here in this story. Darling spends her days with her friends, stealing fruit from trees to stay fed. She has to avoid predatory priests and child prostitution. Her father is dying of AIDS, and she is witness to the suicide of a stranger who is similarly afflicted. Her 10-year old friend is pregnant from a rape by her grandfather. These may very well represent small village life in sub-Saharan Africa, but rather than using fiction to explore the undelying effects this all has on the social fabric, it is really just presented and we move on in the story.
The second two thirds of the book is about the transition to the reality of life in America as compared to what Darling thinks it will be--in this segment of the story I am reminded of the film 'Lost Boys of the Sudan', where a group of boys in war-torn Sudan are pulled from a refuge camp and brough the the U.S. under a church sponsorship. They are stunned by the amount that they have to work to be successful in the U.S without much in the way of a formal education. They are subject to all sorts of barriers, but the dream that they had was that it would all be quite easy, when in fact the process of climbing the ladder of success is very arduous. This book is very well written, but I think I would have been happier with the two halves of the story staying separated rather than merged. It is the author's first book, though, and a very strong showing.
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