AQUARIAN DAWN

Fifteen-year-old Ada Ekene leaves her home of Nabuka, a fictional country in West Africa, to start a new life with her mother in Pennsylvania.

Ada isn’t excited about this new life. Even though her home country is on the brink of civil war, she misses the warmth and attention of her great-aunt and stepfather, so different from her chilly interactions with her mother. At school, Ada meets Sal and Stacey, who are sporadically intertwined in her story as the book guides readers through Ada’s first-person perspective, from being a teenager exploring love and drugs right through to her blossoming as a college poet writing fiercely about the war in Nabuka. Back home, Ada was accused of being an ogbanje, or reincarnated spirit child. She straddles two worlds, with one foot in this plane and the other in a place where she sees spirits. The mystical aspects of this identity are not as fully explored as other internal conflicts, making it difficult to follow that element of her journey. Relationships that seem critical for understanding the person Ada is growing into, like the one with her mother, are underdeveloped, and plotlines, like her search for her paternal and maternal extended families, are introduced but dropped with little resolution. Still, readers will find Ada’s story, every twist and turn, is worth the trip.

A sometimes-meandering narrative journey with a magnetic main character.