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(3.75) | Keine | It's 1986 and twenty-one-year-old Angie continues to mourn the death of her brilliant and radical sister Ella. On impulse, she travels from Detroit to the place where Ella tragically died four years before in Nigeria. She retraces her sister's steps, all the while navigating the chaotic landscape of a major African country on the brink of democracy careening toward a coup d'état. At the center of this quest is a love affair that upends everything Angie thought she knew about herself. Against a backdrop of Nigeria's infamous go-slow traffic as wild and surprising as a Fela lyric Angie begins to unravel the mysteries of the past, and opens herself up to love and life after Ella.… (mehr) |
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Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. "In the world through which I travel,
I am endlessly creating myself."
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks | |
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Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. To the memory of my sister,
Deborah Jeanne Davis,
Whose shimmering brilliance still lights my way. | |
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Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. | |
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▾Literaturhinweise Literaturhinweise zu diesem Werk aus externen Quellen. Wikipedia auf EnglischKeine ▾Buchbeschreibungen It's 1986 and twenty-one-year-old Angie continues to mourn the death of her brilliant and radical sister Ella. On impulse, she travels from Detroit to the place where Ella tragically died four years before in Nigeria. She retraces her sister's steps, all the while navigating the chaotic landscape of a major African country on the brink of democracy careening toward a coup d'état. At the center of this quest is a love affair that upends everything Angie thought she knew about herself. Against a backdrop of Nigeria's infamous go-slow traffic as wild and surprising as a Fela lyric Angie begins to unravel the mysteries of the past, and opens herself up to love and life after Ella. ▾Bibliotheksbeschreibungen Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. ▾Beschreibung von LibraryThing-Mitgliedern
Zusammenfassung in Haiku-Form |
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Aktuelle DiskussionenKeineGoogle Books — Lädt ... Tausch (1 vorhanden, 3 gewünscht)
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The story within Into the Go-Slow by Bridgett M. Davis is intriguing. As an eldest sister, I found Angie’s difficulty in defining herself separate from her relationship to her elder sisters interesting. I admit, I’ve always been too mired in the responsibility of being the Little Mom to put much effort into imagining what my younger siblings’ experience of me as their Big Sister was. Seeing this experience through Angie’s eyes was an interesting shift of perspective for me.
Another shift in perspective came when Angie arrived in Lagos and experienced for the first time being surrounded by people who looked like her. Of course, I’m not surprised that the majority of people in Lagos are black, but for some reason it really struck me this time just how much I take for granted the experience of being surrounded by people of my own race here in the US. (I think if Angie had been willing to visit Atlanta with her other sister, she’d have had a similar experience of race, but Nigeria’s a much more interesting destination and has the benefit of having a history that feels less personal for someone who's grown up in the US than the South does, which allows Angie to feel the joy of being in a black culture without the automatic awareness of its history and the failures of the government in which it exists. She feels this joy and can find out the other stuff later, whereas in Atlanta, her knowledge of the history of the place might have influenced her experience from the beginning.)
I also enjoyed the ways in which Davis juxtaposed the negatives of Nigeria with those in the United States. I particularly smiled at this reference:
Of course, the downside of these comparisons is that I’m already in a fairly perpetually crappy mood about the US, and it really doesn’t help my frame of mind to be reminded that the situation isn’t necessarily any better in most of the rest of the world.
As much as I liked the story, though, Davis’ execution lacked the subtlety I prefer in my fiction. An example, from when Angie first arrived in Nigeria:
I want that kind of thing to unfold more quietly and in a way that invites me to put the pieces together myself rather than having them handed to me. Instead the references were direct, the metaphors blatant, and that left me disappointed as a reader.
That said, I enjoyed reading this book, especially the Nigeria half. Davis really did a solid job describing Lagos and Kano. I felt immersed in the heat and the chaos and how they influenced Angie’s frame of mind. I think the book might have been stronger if Ella’s story had been interspersed with the Nigeria parts, but it also might have been more clunky, so I’ll refrain from any more armchair editing. ( )