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Synopsis
Rutledge Jordan is looking for redemption. A Peace Corps worker finishing up a monastic two-year stint in Tanzania, he teaches villagers how to build fish ponds. He is a long way from his previous life in Memphis, Tennessee - a life of legal briefs and expositions, sweaty infidelities, and a wrecked engagement. In the lush Usambara Mountains, Jordan hopes to start over. Despite his labors, the sins of his past revisit him in the form of a beautiful young school girl named Zanifa. Promised to a wealthy, Oxford-educated African prince, she awaits her marriage and forced ritual mutilation with a mixture of hope and resignation. But Jordan becomes outraged, refusing to accept the girl's fate. And as his initial attraction to Zanifa grows into an obsession, he decides her only salvation lies in her seduction... Now the cycle of passion and vengeance is set in motion and the prince will demand his own cruel revenge. In a desperate and determined final gesture of love, Jordan takes a risk at once noble, foolhardy, and terrifying. And in a shocking conclusion, the price of love and justice will be levied and paid.
Publishers Weekly
Impressive action scenes begin and end this debut novel by magazine journalist Coleman. Between them are brief, haunting descriptions of the incursions of pop culture on the rural life of Tanzania, but there's a heavy equatorial stillness at the heart of the story. Rutledge Jordan is a Peace Corps volunteer five months away from the end of his contract, teaching Usambara Mountain dwellers to farm fish. In his free time, he rescues a runt eaglet and trains it, and he obsesses about his failure to marry the woman back home and to settle into life as a member of a prestigious law firm in Memphis. When he meets Zanifa, a 16-year-old innocent engaged to the sinister local sultan and scheduled to undergo ritual circumcision before the ceremony, his lust for her and his scorn for the sultan provoke Jordan to make a grand, if self-serving, effort to save Zanifa from mutilation. A few Graham Greene-like characters hover at the edge of the narrative, but neither they nor Coleman's themes (the unworldly but uninnocent American in Africa, the coming of democracy to Tanzania) achieve three-dimensionality. Coleman ends up with an engaging travelogue but a formulaic story. (Mar.) FYI: Coleman lived for two years in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania.