A Girl Named Disaster

By Nancy Farmer

Nhamo is a Shona girl living in a traditional village in Mozambique. Her mother died when Nhamo was very young and she doesn't really remember her much. Her father was young fool from Zimbabwe who went back there and was never heard from again. Nhamo lives with her maternal grandmother and her two aunts and some cousins. Her aunts, it seems, were jealous of her mother, who got to go to away to school and learn to read and write, while they had to stay home. Even though Nhamo's mother has been dead for many years, they still feel envious and take it out on Nhamo, making her days one long round of chores and work. But her granny loves her very much, which helps make up for her feelings of loneliness.
It turns out that the reason Nhamo's father disappeared is because he killed a man in Mozambique and fled back to Zimbabwe. The relatives of the murdered man still want to be compensated for the man's death but Nhamo's family doesn't have the wherewithal to pay the blood debt. So it is decided that Nhamo will marry into the dead man's family, this despite the fact that the man she is to marry is very much older than her and has three wives already. And that Nhamo's status in this group will be that of virtual slave and her early death from abuse or murder by the jealous older wives is pretty much assured.
So, urged on by her dying granny, Nhamo steals a row boat and sets off up the river to Zimbabwe to find her daddy. Even though she is only about 11 or 12 years old, she is very capable and manages pretty good until one night when she ties the boat to some reeds and falls asleep only to wake up the next day to discover that the boat became unmoored and has drifted all the way back past her village and beyond it into a huge man-made lake. This lake is so big its like being on the ocean. Nhamo can't even see the shore. Still she manages to row to an island and thus she gradually makes her way through the huge lake, island hopping and living off the land. She has a hard time of it with encounters with wild animals and gets stung by a scorpion and almost starves to death. Still she plugs on because to give up means death.

This is one of those books intended for teenage readers that is also suited for adults. It isn't preachy and boring or predictable, like so much teen lit, especially teen lit for girls. Life in her village is so different from the modern world; they have no electricity, no water except what they get from the river and virtually no education, especially for girls, who are not considered worth educating. Everywhere they look, the world is filled with spirits, good, bad and indifferent and care has to be taken not to offend these very touchy spirits. Nhamo and her granny are both born story tellers and the book is full of these little, often amusing folk tales. Nhamo's journey is riveting and exciting and she is a very sympathetic heroine. I really enjoyed this story a lot.