Skip to main content

Broadened View Point


Hello Lovelies! For this tbt, I'm looking at a book I read a couple years ago at the suggestion of Rosianna. I don't often read adult books, but I'd never read anything like Ghana Must Go. It's a book I think about fairly consistently. 


Here's what I wrote about it on Goodreads:

Ghana Must Go is the fascinating story of one family's beginning and ending. When the father of the Sai family dies, the family is brought back together for the funeral. Through their interactions, we learn about the destruction they have survived thus far and how it has affected the family members. By the end, we hope to see them healing. 

This isn't typically a novel I would have picked up, but I saw Rosianna's (missxrojas on youtube's) review of it. I'm so glad I decided to grab it. 

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys people. If you find people and their problems interesting, you'd probably enjoy Ghana Must Go.


While I was reading this book, for the first half of it or so, I wasn't entirely sure I was enjoying it. It's a bit slow (even though it starts with their father dying) because you don't yet know the family. Once I started to understand the family members as individuals and as a whole family, I needed to know how they were going to heal from the death and the funeral. 

I had never even heard of Taiye Selasi before I read Ghana Must Go. She's of Nigerian and Ghanian descent and born in London but grew up in Boston, MA. Her writing is beautiful. It also made me aware of how embedded racism was in my own thoughts.

Ghana Must Go was my first experience with a current book set in an African country. Even though before I'd read it, I had met two totally different people from two separate African countries, I still thought of Africa of primarily rural with people in tribes--the kind of imagery we learn from school and National Geographic when we're young in America. Ghana Must Go showed me how wrong I was in my mind. I was shown first-hand how diverse books affect everybody. (I cannot even imagine how reading this book as someone of Ghanian descent would feel because it's so outside my own scope of being, but I imagine it would be pretty damn awesome.) 



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

More Diversity in Your Book Diet

Hello Lovelies! As usual Top Ten Tuesday is brought to you by the lovely people over at The Broke and the Bookish . Today's topic is Top Ten Books for People Who Like X, and I'm going to go with... Top Ten Books for People Who Like Diversity Thanks to the efforts of groups like We Need Diverse Books, diversity is having a resurgence in young adult and children's books. For the last couple years, I have been trying to read more books with diverse characters or by diverse authors. (Diverse in this respect includes race, sexuality, gender, and disability). I haven't endeavored to challenge myself to only read a certain type of book i.e. only those by women of color or anything that isn't by a white heterosexual male, but I try to be extra aware of the characters and ask myself if they actually are white (sometimes the text doesn't say it, sometimes people just assume it!) and if being white is necessary for the character or not.  But here are my top t...
Blarghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Hello lovelies. I'm feeling super overwhelmed by life since I'm doing Camp Nanowrimo and trying to move and find a place to live 2600 miles away. So that's my excuse for missing last week. But now you get two weeks in a row. So this week's theme (hosted as always by The Broke and the Bookish ) is... Top Ten Favorite Movies   (And I picked Scary Movies) I have a secret. Or I guess I had a secret. And that secret is that I love  scary movies. Like anything that plays on gross special effects or melting walls or sudden appearances--I'm totally down for it. (This has only back fired on me once--when I had a panic attack watching Saw 2--I don't wanna talk about it...) So in no particular order, movies that really impressed me with their scare factors: 1. Thir13een Ghosts -- there's this scene with a glass door that is ingrained in my brain.  2. Haunting in Conneticut -- aw man, this movie is sooo good. I actu...
Happy New Year's Eve Lovelies!! I hope you are all out having a terrific night and that you won't see this until 2014 has officially rung in.  Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by the wonderful people over at The Broke & the Bookish --check out their post or their list of other awesome blogs who have participated! 1. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell: Once I put up my year in review survey, no one will be surprised by this, but this book is definitely my favorite of the year. It is the most amazing book I've read in a long while.  2. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell: Oh Fangirl, I just barely squeezed you in to 2013, but I managed it. Mostly because once I picked it up I didn't put it back down. I couldn't. It was sort of like reading a pseudo-AU of my life. 3. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang: This was a wonderful book that showed the commonalities and differences of people of all ages across cultures. I loved it.  4. Hyperbole an...