Book Reviews
The vision is entirely that of the mother, which is, of course, the point of it all, but also a constriction. There is a didactic quality here, and the reader, standing in for Zenzele, feels a trifle cornered. The wisdoms and warnings sometimes sit uneasily alongside the more telling immediacy of the events that are the core of the book
That grumble out of the way, let it be said that there are plenty of rewards here too—a rich impression of the warmth and color of Zimbabwean family life, a view of the traumas of the struggle for independence through a series of sharp vignettes, and, above all, a sense of the mother's passionate conviction that "Africa needs the hearts and minds of its sons and daughters.... The address to Zenzele is not a plea for the retention of traditional values, though it is a sturdy defense of the importance of recognizing and cherishing your roots.
Penelope Lively - New York Times Book Review
Elegiac stress lends power to the story, resulting in a humane antiminimalism that may owe some of its richness to the work of authenticating in writing a largely unwritten experience. Although Maraire yields at times to rhetorical overflow, she mainly imbues the novel with the complexities of the mother's rural life as it undergoes political transformation in the world of the city. —Molly McQuade
Booklist
Maraire, a Harvard-educated native of Zimbabwe now living in the United States, has written a beautifully poignant first novel about what it means to be a woman in Africa. The novel is written in the form of a letter from a mother to her daughter, Zenzele, who is just beginning her studies at Harvard. The mother writes of her girlhood in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe's colonial name), the struggle for Zimbabwe's independence, and her hopes and fears for the next generation. She has watched villagers send the best of her generation to Europe or America for an education, with the hope that they would return with their newly learned skills to better the lives of their compatriots. Instead, she is saddened when they do not return home to live but come back only for visits, seeming to have lost all remnants of African culture. The mother offers her own stories in hopes that her daughter, while creating herself, will never forget whence she came. Highly recommended for women's studies collections and to general readers seeking an intimate view of another life.—Debbie Bogenschutz
Library Journal