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A Novel
by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
Paperback Original: To protect her daughter from the fast life and bad influences of London, her mother sent her to school in rural Ghana. The move was for the girl's own good, in her mother's mind, but for the daughter, the reality of being the new girl, the foreigner-among-your-own-people, was even worse than the idea.
During her time at school, she would learn that Ghana was much more complicated than her fellow ex-pats had ever told her, including how much a London-raised child takes something like water for granted. In Ghana, water "became a symbol of who had and who didn't, who believed in God and who didn't. If you didn't have water to bathe, you were poor because no one had sent you some."
After six years in Ghana, her mother summons her home to London to meet the new man in her mother's life?and his daughter. The reunion is bittersweet and short-lived as her parents decide it's time that she get to know her father. So once again, she's sent off, this time to live with her father, his new wife, and their young children in New York?but not before a family trip to Disney World.
"Far from the classic finding-your-roots story, this contemporary debut .. is unsettling drama, with no clear coming home, and that is what makes the wry, honest first-person narrative so memorable and so surprising." - Booklist
"Though the evangelical undertones may turn off some ... the beauty of the prose and the resilience of the heroine make this a winning debut." - Publishers Weekly
"Recommended for readers who enjoyed Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
"Interesting vignettes, but this novel never feels whole. Though billed as women's fiction, the book will be of more interest to younger readers." - Kirkus Reviews
"With its strong character development, this work presents a fresh and diverse alternative to the standard coming-of-age story ... could whet the appetite of the YA audience. Recommended for readers who enjoyed Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus.
This information about Powder Necklace was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond has written for AOL, Parenting Magazine, the Village Voice, Metro and Trace Magazine. Her short story "Bush Girl”" was published in the May 2008 issues of African Writing and her poem, "The Whinings of a Seven Sister Cum Laude Graduate Working Board as an Assistant," was published in 2006's Growing up Girl Anthology. A cum laude graduate of Vassar College, she attended secondary school in Ghana. Powder Necklace is loosely based on the experience.
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