Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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The family clearly love Africa - but it certainly wasn't easy for them and they seemed to move between countries very easily. How can I love them, they are so very far from any way I could live my own life, but nevertheless I love them to pieces. As more black students and staff transfer in, a drought comes on and the students are made to share bathwater. One girl used the toilet while the other held a candle high to check for "snakes and scorpions and baboon spiders. She is also very aware of her family's thick lips, contrasting with their pale skin and blonde hair.

Not because of sentiment, but because the rings are the family's single valuable possession, and must be pawned as security prior to planting the tobacco crop each year. In the Burma Valley, the cool night air sinks and the rising air contains, in a layer, the tapped scents of midday. I did however, feel that she should have written about how she came to see how racist her family was and how she isn't racist (or is she still? In Devuli, Zimbabwe, they drink “thin, animal-smelling milk” and go to sleep in “the kind of shattering silence that comes after a generator has been shut off”.Fuller sees the adults around her with the fierce penetration of someone who has moved beyond blame.

As a kid, you have no idea your parents are racist, so it can be uncomfortable to read of this families ideas of blacks, but also deeply informing. It is a period of history I knew nothing about and a place I have not visited, but the writing transported me there completely. I know that a lot of people find great enjoyment from repeat readings, discovering new layers to the story and gaining a better understanding of the book. It is told in a chatty and slightly childish and rambling style (she is a child for most of the book), mostly in the present tense. She had absorbed the notion that white people were there to benevolently shepherd the natives, but came to question it when she met Africans for herself.

The rainy season that brought with it gray solid sheets of water which rendered roads as thick and sticky as porridge.

Fuller’s memoir quickly draws the reader into her girlhood growing up in Africa with candor and humor.She hardly bothers to blink, it's as if she's a fish in the dry season, in the dried-up bottom of a cracking river bed, waiting for rain to come and bring her to life. That's the individual mystery of talent, a gift with which Alexandra Fuller is richly blessed, and with which she illuminates her extraordinary memoir.

It is a true story of a white girl growing up in Africa during the civil war, and it smacks of colonialism and racism, both of which I dislike.Unflinching, beautifully written, and, at times, extremely funny, Alexandra Fuller's book is one of the most honest memoirs of a childhood to be found in contemporary writing. If Fuller's family and friends are any indication, it would appear that white people can only cope with African life through heavy boozing. I look back on my life and realize that there were many times that I could have been killed by something I had done when I was young and wandering the countryside by myself. For instance, the four stages of Mum's drunken behaviour in front of visitors is treated humourously. Her voice, tone, and pacing supported the writing perfectly, I kept imagining it was the author herself speaking to me, and I was readily immersed in the dreaminess of the landscape, and the realness of the stories.