Sister Spirit

Sister Spirit is part magical fantasy, part coming of age novel about Tara, a sixteen-year-old, mixed-race girl who is haunted by strange and frightening dreams about a past she doesn’t recognise. Tara is adopted and her parents are both white. Her dreams leave her with a sense of loss and emptiness and make her determined to reconnect with her roots. With the support of her parents she travels to Nigeria where she enrols in a boarding school making friends and enemies as she navigates through her new life. The school is at the foot of Olumo rock- a malevolent and constant presence in her increasingly dark and pernicious dreams. The reality of the day to day at boarding school in a new place becomes entangled with the fantasy of the dreams and the book tells the story of Tara’s quest to find the truth and lay the ghosts of her past and the past of her ancestors to rest.

This is a complex and complicated novel which has many themes, combining the trials, tribulations and joys of teenage life with the mystical legends of the past and the realities of modern Nigeria. There’s a great deal of subject matter covered and the result is a whirlwind of a plot which weaves between the real and unreal worlds and blurs the boundaries of fantasy and reality. Efua Traoré has a distinctive and accomplished style and her expert storytelling combines rich and detailed descriptions of Nigerian life, landscape and legend with extraordinary adventures and Lanre’s emotional journey of self-discovery.