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Overview
In the tradition of Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, Elizabeth Nunez weaves a personal story into the broader tapestry of political history. Twenty-year-old Sara Edgehill has left her native Trinidad in 1963 to attend college in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where she joins two other girls -- Courtney from St. Lucia and Angela from British Guyana -- in the task of integrating the all-white school. For Sara, coming from a world in which she is connected to a vibrant community and culture, this cold, alien place in which she is neither loved nor understood is profoundly shocking and disorienting.She longs to return to Trinidad, but knows she must finish college. Slowly, Sara finds support in her friendship with Courtney, who covertly proctices voodoo rituals, and in a blossoming relationship with Sam, an African-American who draws her into the turbulent civil rights movement.
Set against vivid historical events and written with poignancy and insight, Beyond the Limbo Silence will surely take its place among the classics of its genre.
Synopsis
In the tradition of Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, Elizabeth Nunez weaves a personal story into the broader tapestry of political history. Twenty-year-old Sara Edgehill has left her native Trinidad in 1963 to attend college in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where she joins two other girls -- Courtney from St. Lucia and Angela from British Guyana -- in the task of integrating the all-white school. For Sara, coming from a world in which she is connected to a vibrant community and culture, this cold, alien place in which she is neither loved nor understood is profoundly shocking and disorienting.
She longs to return to Trinidad, but knows she must finish college. Slowly, Sara finds support in her friendship with Courtney, who covertly proctices voodoo rituals, and in a blossoming relationship with Sam, an African-American who draws her into the turbulent civil rights movement.
Set against vivid historical events and written with poignancy and insight, Beyond the Limbo Silence will surely take its place among the classics of its genre.
Anderson Tepper
...[The protagonist] succumbs to the sea of emotions, both personal and racial....even as the novel sinks under the weight of an interior language of ancestral mysticism. -- The New York Times Book Review