Dreams of the Kalahari - Softcover

Slaughter, Carolyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671659057 ISBN 13: 9780671659059

Publisher: Fireside, 1988

Synopsis

Raised in Africa, Emily Jones is determined to return there when she is forced to move to England with her parents

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

There is a beautiful, dream-like quality to this unusual coming-of-age novel. The only child of English parents who arrived in the African Protectorate of Bechuanaland full of illusions about what their new country would offer, Emily Jones grows up in an atmosphere darkened by dashed hopes. Her father's disappointment takes the form of bitterness, directed against his wife and child and the native population. Her mother's is manifested in increasingly severe psychosomatic illnesses. Struggling for her own emotional survival, Emily falls back on imaginary companions and the friendship of the family's African servants. Slaughter (The Innocents is a fine writer, able to depict characters and moods with a few deft words. Emily's story unfolds episodically, in a series of vignettes so vivid, each could stand alone. Africa and its native people, however, are Slaughter's real achievement. Her portrait of that vast, troubled land is haunting.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Emily, daughter of an English administrator in Botswana and his bored wife, goes to convent school where she is alternately tempted to deep religious passion and repelled by the fanaticism; falls in love at 11 and seduces the man (who is married) at 16; is shipped off to England, where she finds and rejoins her old school chum, now an anti-apartheid activist; falls in love with an exiled South African journalist; and finally, returns to Botswana to face with her lover the final agonies of that unhappy land. Africa and England are almost more central to Emily's odyssey than the characters flitting over the landscape. For all her passionate attachments, she seems adrift, as is the novel itself at times. Still, the flavor of the land, its overpowering effect on both blacks and whites, dwarfs all else and compensates for their diminishment. Ann Donovan, Central Washington Univ. Lib., Ellensburg
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fireside
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0671659057
• ISBN 13: 9780671659059
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 315