Far from Home
When is a terrorist a freedom fighter? This stirring novel tells the history of what is now Zimbabwe, was once Southern Rhodesia, and for long before that, was the land of tribal peoples. The tragedy of displacement is the core of the drama: how the whites (the Portuguese, the Boers, and finally, the British) took the blacks’ ancestral land with brutal removals to native reserves and imposed taxes that forced the men to leave their families to work in the mines. The plain, first-person prose follows the viewpoints of individual young people across generations: Tariro is raped by a white man, who kills the boy she loves. Her child, Taiwona, grows up on the reserve, shamed by her light skin; then she joins the resistance movement fighting for independence. Then there’s white Katie, who realizes that she is part of a privileged racist family with a servant “girl” and garden “boy,” and her father fights the “communist terrorists” who want his farm. Without slick relativism, the personal stories get straight to the meaning of home. Grades 7-12. --Hazel Rochman