Adé: A Love Story
In a fiction debut that is as much a novel of self-discovery and identity as a lucent love story, memoirist Walker brings her background and literary strengths to bear. When the 19-year-old unnamed narrator and her Yale friend, Miriam, start their long travels, arriving in Africa becomes life-changing. In Egypt, the narrator feels she belongs for the first time, with her copper-colored skin and brown, almond-shaped eyes. Then in Lamu, an island off the coast of Kenya, she falls in love with handsome Swahili Muslim Adé, who gives her the Arabic name Farida. As Miriam resumes traveling alone, Farida and Adé live together simply and make plans to marry. But Swahili custom requires face-to-face meetings to ask for parental approval, and political realities strike previously entitled American Farida for the first time. Walker knows whereof she writes. Farida, like the author (daughter of novelist Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Levanthal), is black, white, and Jewish and a child of divorce, and Walker uses this knowledge to good effect here. A brief, sensuous love story grounded in painful reality. --Michele Leber