Adé

Memoirist Walker (Baby Love) delivers a slender first novel based on her own life. After graduating from Yale, Farida and her friend Miriam decide to travel through Africa together. Armed with her liberal ideas about feminism and “first world romanticism,” Farida is instantly charmed and feels strangely at home. During a visit to an island off the coast of Kenya, a disillusioned Miriam decides to move on, while Farida, falling in love with Adé, a local fisherman, stays. Adé and Farida’s relationship is unbelievably conflict-free: despite the fact that she is foreign and not Muslim, his family accepts her; he engages in a sexual relationship with her, and she happily embraces the fantasy of a life with him, rationalizing the changes in her attitude. When the couple decides to marry, Adé insists on going to America to ask for her parents’ permission, which leads to Farida’s fantasy colliding with the reality of life in a developing nation. Walker’s prose is evocative and poetic, but Farida’s charmless naïveté grows thin early on, and her revelations seem obvious. (Oct.)