Jennie Redling

This novel transports the reader into another time and place, precolonial Ghana, where the surprising brutality of native cultures enslaving each other creates a crisis in the lives of two women. One is a pure innocent, savagely torn from her family and sold to a brutal man, the other a powerful leader's daughter, a fierce young women who has grown up knowing only honor and respect. Yet in an increasingly dangerous political climate, both become oppressed in body and spirit and only when their lives cross does the chance at freedom appear. The author's words, at once plainspoken and poetic, charge the senses and bring the vibrant country and culture vividly alive. The passion and longing each woman struggles to conceal, overcome, express, and finally to use has unchanged. The world created here rings with truth, of Ghana's hidden past and in the hauntingly beautiful account of two women whose feelings awaken a belief in the triumph of the human spirit.