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The reader enters Nangle’s debut novel in the midst of a fever dream: Protagonist Colleen is in the throes of malaria as a young girl. The daughter of white missionaries in Rhodesia (the African country’s bone-shaking transition into Zimbabwe provides the novel’s historical backdrop), Colleen cannot get her head together. Dreams blend into reality in a way that she, as a white girl in the last years of white rule, cannot meld with the populace.
Colleen’s estrangement from the country in which she lives is no less severe than her separation from her family. Her mother dies young, her father cannot cope with Colleen’s illness, and her sister shows signs of schizophrenia. When an African friend develops cancer, Colleen wants to connect with her, but the walls between whites and blacks are too thick. She enters a limbo, unsure of where she belongs, but certain it’s not in either of the two worlds surrounding her.
Nangle, a daughter of missionaries who was raised in southern Africa, knows both the physical and psychological terrain well. At times, she knows it almost too well—some of the observations come across a bit on-the-nose, as when she describes Colleen as “a thief continuing to steal what was African, parts of Africa, and make it hers.”
Colleen ages, Rhodesia upheaves, and these types of observations become so obvious in the every day they hardly need articulating. And as Colleen matures so does the writing.
