Khosi is "all the time torn between her mama and Gogo (her grandmother), the new world and the old world, the science she learns at school and the African medicine Gogo sends her to fetch from the Sangoma (traditional healer)." Her parents fought apartheid and have not married because her father cannot find a job to pay the lobolo (bride price). Her mother is a teacher, but must work in a distant village and comes home only on week-ends. South Africa is afflicted with the three letter plague - HIV. Khosi is afflicted with nightmares sent by the ancestors and by a dirty old man she often passes while walking home from school. She has just come of age. Her mama wants Khosi and Zi , her sister, to be modern Zulu women - not dependent on superstition...or on men. She counsels them to not look at the past. "It's there and will always be there and there is nothing you can do to change it...You must look ahead. There is only this thing called the future." The author's use of Zulu words lent authenticity to the story, but footnotes on on each page would have been preferable to the end-of-the-book glossary. This is an awesome, compelling, inspiring, book dealing with the devastation of aids, morality, death, and family.
"Anger leads us all to do things we regret."
"If we don't help others what will happen to us when we are the ones needing help?"
"Science doesn't explain everything."
"It is true that evil is blind, but anger is a path in the forest, guiding evil through the dark, right to you."
Gateway Award Preliminary Nominee 2013-14
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