Rating: 
Summary: An uncomfortable read
Review: This is a very personal account of a girl growing up in Africa.
Feels a lot like reading someone's diary, with the family's losses, grief, and subsequent functional breakdown exposed for all to see.
It's written truthfully, maybe too much so.
I was very absorbed by this book, but I'm not sure I can say I actually enjoyed it.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant, funny insight into post-colonial Africa
Review: What makes this book worth reading -- aside from a captivating style and humorous content -- is precisely what separates it from other excellent books about similar subject matter (Godwin's Mukiwa, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions): the fact that Fuller makes no attempt to analyze, excuse, or explain the racism and insanity of her family history. Rather than rationalizing her parents' racist attitudes, Fuller chooses instead to simply describe in her wry, matter-of-fact voice precisely how the end of the colonial era was experienced by people implicated in it. She does not try to gloss her childhood experiences with politically correct hindsight, and in so doing thrusts the reader into the desperation and the joy of rural African life in the last three decades. Bobo's mother is one of the most memorable and remarkable personalities I've encountered in African literature. The book is worth reading entirely for its hysterical concluding scenes. Fuller's characters are real and human, in all their extraordinary bizarreness! Having spent many an hour, like Bobo Fuller, poking grass into ant-lion holes in the hot dusty veld, this moving story captivated me and painted a moving portrait of people fighting the cruelty of the African landscape. Myth and reality are intertwined in a witty and beautiful story. Everyone should read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Hope
Review: Yes it's about a family tragedy set within an awful war, but unlike some books that grind on and on with sadness and despair there is none of that here. I was riveted by the author's gritty, honest, down to earth style, and how she made that convincing even from the viewpoint of a child. At the worst moments of the story it was not helplessness, but pluck, determination and human dignity that reverberated through the words. The author is a survivor not a victim. The end of the book came far too soon... I was left wanting the rest of the story. And I was left with one feeling-hope.
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