when the ground is hard

Read When the Ground Is Hard by Malla Nunn

Adele Joubert loves being one of the popular girls at Keziah Christian Academy. She knows the upcoming semester at school is going to be great with her best friend Delia at her side. Then Delia dumps her for a new girl with more money, and Adele is forced to share a room with Lottie, the school pariah, who doesn’t pray and defies teachers’ orders.
But as they share a copy of Jane Eyre, Lottie’s gruff exterior and honesty grow on Adele, and Lottie learns to be a little sweeter. Together, they take on bullies and protect each other from the vindictive and prejudiced teachers. Then a boy goes missing on campus and Adele and Lottie must rely on each other to solve the mystery and maybe learn the true meaning of friendship.

I really enjoyed When the ground is hard. The protagonist, Adele, has learned all the tricks to make the popular girls like her and to be one of them… until suddenly she isn’t anymore, dethroned by a new rich girl. In 1960s Swaziland, broken by Apartheid, a school for mixed-race girls (the richer the kid,…

how the one-armed sister sweeps her house

Read How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones

In Baxter’s Beach, Barbados, Lala’s grandmother Wilma tells the story of the one-armed sister. It’s a cautionary tale, about what happens to girls who disobey their mothers and go into the Baxter’s Tunnels. When she’s grown, Lala lives on the beach with her husband, Adan, a petty criminal with endless charisma whose thwarted burglary of one of the beach mansions sets off a chain of events with terrible consequences. A gunshot no one was meant to witness. A new mother whose baby is found lifeless on the beach. A woman torn between two worlds and incapacitated by grief. And two men driven into the Tunnels by desperation and greed who attempt a crime that will risk their freedom – and their lives.

A haunting, terrible tale. Lala has a husband. He’s not a good man. In fact, he killed a man, whose wife had a husband and doesn’t anymore. Lala has a child, for a week. Then she doesn’t, and her husband blames her and she knows he’ll kill her if she doesn’t leave. Lala doesn’t leave.…