Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Manenzhe debuts with a poetic and wrenching story of one family's upheaval. It's 1927 and South Africa's Immorality Act is about to call into question the already somewhat troubled marriage between Abram, who is white, and Alisa, who is Black, as well as the legitimacy of their two daughters. After Alisa dies by suicide in a fire that kills their younger daughter, Abram and their surviving daughter, Dido, who's seven, flee in search of a new home. Their story frames excerpts from the journals Alisa kept as a young woman, relating her childhood born to formerly enslaved people in Jamaica, her adoption by a wealthy white English family, and her desire--guided by persistent feelings of alienation--to travel to Africa. Manenzhe steeps this saga in stories and rituals passed down from elders to children, such as Dido's nanny, Gloria, explaining a ritual involving a pot of water used to speak to their ancestors. As Gloria and others share scenes of their ancestors' forced migration and their sometimes fruitless search for home, the family's quest takes on mythical proportions. "Stories never rot," Abram says to the ever curious and imaginative Dido. Indeed, the novel feels both grounded and timeless, as Manenzhe fuses this tragedy of South Africa's segregationist policies with a long tradition of folklore. There's great heft to this universal story. Agent: Maria Cardona, Pontas Literary & Film. (Dec.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In 1927, when South Africa passed the Immorality Act prohibiting sexual intercourse between "Europeans" (white people) and "natives" (Black people), a white man named Abram and Black, Jamaican-born Alisa, whose ancestors had been enslaved, suddenly find their marriage criminalized. Since its publication in South Africa in late 2020, this wrenching work has become the most awarded debut in the country's history. With a 40,000-copy first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In 1927, when "illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives" in South Africa is prohibited by the Immorality Act, the van Zijl family's fate turns tragic. South African writer Manenzhe's debut looks back to an especially cruel moment in history when sexual relations between Blacks and Whites were pronounced unlawful, threatening prison for the adults involved. Such is the situation for Abram van Zijl, who's White, and his "black and English" wife, Alisa, who are parents to two daughters, Dido and Emilia. One horrific decision by Alisa shatters the family early in the book, and it's her psychology, history, and choices that dominate the story and set the tone. Born the daughter of a slave in Jamaica, orphaned when young, she was adopted by a kindly White man who brought her to England. Alienated and haunted by her birth father and the stories he told her before he died, Alisa has always felt herself unloved, unrooted, condemned to a "legacy of wandering and melancholy." She travels tirelessly, eventually heading to Africa, sensing she might trace her origins there, but onboard ship she meets Abram, of Dutch and English heritage, and instead discovers a love that will bring her a home and family. Over time, however, the relationship fades, and Alisa's unsatisfied need for connection returns, but now the external world is poised to intervene. Manenzhe's poetic narrative, sometimes dreamy, piercing, and lyrical, at other times denser, is threaded with heartache and suffering as well as ancestral myth and symbolism. There are loose ends--questions about Alisa that are not fully answered by long extracts from her journals included in the text. The result is a choppy story of long-endured, compounded oppression. Its closing chapters allow a suggestion of peace, but not for all. An elegiac view of colonial and racial injustice. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
