This post is late because I wasn't sure if I wanted to publish it at all. You see, I hated this book so much that I wasn't sure I wanted to give it any sort of extra publicity at all. That being said, I feel like it would be disingenuous to only post books that I enjoyed instead of pointing out problematic books of our era. With that being said, here we go:
Adrienne Benson managed to write a book that managed to be an insult to everyone reading it. She had three main characters, the white woman who escapes her problems by going to Africa, the other white woman who escapes her problems by going to Africa, and the Maasai woman whose problems can only be fixed by the white woman fleeing reality.
I don't even want to talk about the story here, what I want to talk about is the trend I have seen of books written by people with very narrow exposure to a culture with their main settings in that culture. In the author bio we see she was brought up by aid workers across sub-Saharan Africa, but never in one place too long. She was not exposed to village life, and was not involved with the local community. She has also written for buzzfeed, which shows as her writing style is easy to follow and the narrative is clear.
Ms. Benson also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. I'm a returned PCV myself, and I would feel woefully unprepared to write a novel about village life in Ghana despite my two years steeped in the culture. Benson crosses a boundary that stopped being appropriate to cross decades ago, and she does it poorly.
Why am I so mad? Well, here's the sentence that made me quit the book for a solid four days before I could pick the piece of trash back up again, "All the mothers there were fine-tuned to the concept of benign neglect; that was the Maasai way."
Adrienne Benson managed to write a book that managed to be an insult to everyone reading it. She had three main characters, the white woman who escapes her problems by going to Africa, the other white woman who escapes her problems by going to Africa, and the Maasai woman whose problems can only be fixed by the white woman fleeing reality.
I don't even want to talk about the story here, what I want to talk about is the trend I have seen of books written by people with very narrow exposure to a culture with their main settings in that culture. In the author bio we see she was brought up by aid workers across sub-Saharan Africa, but never in one place too long. She was not exposed to village life, and was not involved with the local community. She has also written for buzzfeed, which shows as her writing style is easy to follow and the narrative is clear.
Ms. Benson also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. I'm a returned PCV myself, and I would feel woefully unprepared to write a novel about village life in Ghana despite my two years steeped in the culture. Benson crosses a boundary that stopped being appropriate to cross decades ago, and she does it poorly.
Why am I so mad? Well, here's the sentence that made me quit the book for a solid four days before I could pick the piece of trash back up again, "All the mothers there were fine-tuned to the concept of benign neglect; that was the Maasai way."
Let me say that I understand what she was attempting to convey, but this hamhanded morally superior tone was the opposite of informing the reader. In fact I think it informs us a lot more of the author than of the tribe she pretends to know.
I would recommend this book to a guttertrash fire or recycling plant, this will be the first book of this blog that I do not share with another person; do not buy this book.
I would recommend this book to a guttertrash fire or recycling plant, this will be the first book of this blog that I do not share with another person; do not buy this book.
No comments:
Post a Comment