"This novel disrupts any comfortable sense of closure to the dilemmas of colonial modernity explored in Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions. Life 'happens' to Tambu and she must make another journey.... This is a most engrossing and provocative sequel [and one] that already begs another. I can't wait for the next book!"—Nana Wilson-Tagoe, SOAS, London

"A most intensely felt and remembered book that reproduces the feel, sight, sound, and emotion of an African convent boarding school a quarter of a century ago.... No book I have read conveys so powerfully and truthfully the wounds of cultural colonialism."—Terrence Ranger, University of Oxford

"This is, as its title suggests, a book about denial and unfulfilled expectations, about the theft of the self that remains one of colonialism's most pernicious legacies. Through all of this, however, it remains funny and engaging, a tale of adolescent rivalry and misadventure, narrated in a style that blends the sardonic with the lyrical."—Chris Warnes, University of Cambridge