Writing with the assurance and wry omniscience of an easygoing deity, Makumbi watches her protagonists live out invariably provisional answers. Some are looking for families, like the orphan girl vying for her neighbors’ charity in a crowded Kampala boardinghouse. There is, nevertheless, a beauty to how Makumbi’s characters improvise alternatives to what they do not have or cannot be. It may be a curse that families never “work,” but it is surely a blessing that they can always be reinvented. The leader is Gbessa, an immortal girl expelled as a witch by her indigenous Vai people, who finds shelter among the black American settlers of Monrovia.

Source: New York Times January 07, 2019 14:48 UTC