‘Powder Necklace’ is loosely based on the experience of a girl, who had to deal with contemporary and cultural issues. To protect her daughter from the fast life and bad influences of London, her mother sent her to school in rural Ghana. The move was for the girl’s own good, in her mother’s mind, but for the daughter, the reality of being the new girl, the foreigner-among-your-own-people, was even worse than the idea.
During her time at school, she would learn that Ghana was much more complicated than her fellow expatriates had ever told her, including how much a London-raised child takes something like water for granted. In Ghana, water “became a symbol of who had and who didn’t, who believed in God and who didn’t. If you didn’t have water to bathe, you were poor because no one had sent you some”.
After six years in Ghana, her mother summons her home to London to meet the new man in her mother’s life and his daughter. The reunion is bittersweet and short-lived as her parents decide it’s time that she get to know her father. So once again, she’s sent off, this time to live with her father, his new wife, and their young children in New York, but not before a family trip to Disney World.
The book is a narrative fictional novel, where the writer seems to paint pictures with her colourful words. The structure of the novel, which is fairly long, is amazingly coherent; the story is very well paced. It is written in first person narrative.
This is a work of great ability. It is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite difficult to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it. Some major cultural differences could be identified in this novel. Readers are strongly encouraged to get a copy of this novel. I can promise you all that you have never read anything like it before.
— The reader is a front office administrator based in Dubai.