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Adé: A Love Story
In this stunning debut novella, Rebecca Walker turns her attention to the power of love and the limitations of the human heart. When Farida, a sophisticated college student, falls in love with Adé, a young Swahili man living on an idyllic island off the coast of Kenya, the two plan to marry and envision a simple life togetherfree of worldly possessions and concerns. But when Farida contracts malaria and finds herself caught in the middle of a civil war, reality crashes in around them. The lovers solitude is interrupted by a world in the throes of massive upheaval that threatens to tear them apart, along with all they cherish.
Haunting, exquisite, and certain to become a classic, Adé will stay with you long after you put it down. This is a timeless love story set perfectly, heartbreakingly, in our time.
Haunting, exquisite, and certain to become a classic, Adé will stay with you long after you put it down. This is a timeless love story set perfectly, heartbreakingly, in our time.
112 pages, Hardcover
First published October 29, 2013
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1430 people want to read
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January 2, 2014
“Again, I felt a sense of belonging- the slow, irrational dissolution of the self I had known, and another core truth of being emerging in concert with the landscape.” - Rebecca Walker, Ade
A mixed race American girl (probably Rebecca Walker herself) takes a year off from university to travel around Africa with her best friend. While in Africa, the friends go through very different transformations. When the unnamed narrator goes to an island off the coast of Kenya, she falls in love with an African Muslim man, Ade.
What I liked about the book the most of all was the beautiful writing style. Rebecca Walker uses such lovely poetic language, especially when she falls in love with Ade. I also liked the themes that were investigated, especially belonging:
“I was being apprehended and to speak would have been to thrust the process, to deny these women the chance to run me through their filters, to digest me and, therefore let me inside and I knew that inside was where I wanted to be; that I would be accepted in the eye at the centre of the storm, and so I calmed myself and let myself be pulled across the divide.”
Overall I found the story a bit rushed. It was a novella that I feel could have worked better as a novel. Character development would have been very welcome, as well as a more in-depth look at various themes. The idea of a privileged atheist American teenager living on a predominantly Muslim African island was so intriguing to me but I don't think it was developed enough.
I did enjoy the book. It was a quick read and if you’re a romantic, not a skeptic like me, you’ll probably enjoy it more!
A mixed race American girl (probably Rebecca Walker herself) takes a year off from university to travel around Africa with her best friend. While in Africa, the friends go through very different transformations. When the unnamed narrator goes to an island off the coast of Kenya, she falls in love with an African Muslim man, Ade.
What I liked about the book the most of all was the beautiful writing style. Rebecca Walker uses such lovely poetic language, especially when she falls in love with Ade. I also liked the themes that were investigated, especially belonging:
“I was being apprehended and to speak would have been to thrust the process, to deny these women the chance to run me through their filters, to digest me and, therefore let me inside and I knew that inside was where I wanted to be; that I would be accepted in the eye at the centre of the storm, and so I calmed myself and let myself be pulled across the divide.”
Overall I found the story a bit rushed. It was a novella that I feel could have worked better as a novel. Character development would have been very welcome, as well as a more in-depth look at various themes. The idea of a privileged atheist American teenager living on a predominantly Muslim African island was so intriguing to me but I don't think it was developed enough.
I did enjoy the book. It was a quick read and if you’re a romantic, not a skeptic like me, you’ll probably enjoy it more!
June 21, 2023
Our unnamed narrator, a biracial college student who is traveling through Africa, falls in love with a Swahili man she meets on an island just off the Kenyan coast. The problem with this is that she grows apart from her traveling buddy, her white best friend. (They had planned this trip as a two-year stint.)
As her love grows, she becomes closer to her lover’s family, and at the same time, struggles with the realities of life under brutal Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi.
The author has created a naïve protagonist, even with her sophisticated upbringing. She is naïve about travel, safety, love, tribalism, war, and sickness. And as readers, we are thrown in the middle of it all, too.
Also, as readers, we get a view of the corruption and violence under President Moi; the unsanitary conditions of the hospital; and military life.
Being a short book, it is quick to get through the ugliness – and still give us an inside view of the love story.
But…it was a harsh road to travel, and not an easy path to navigate or read. 3.5 stars.
As her love grows, she becomes closer to her lover’s family, and at the same time, struggles with the realities of life under brutal Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi.
The author has created a naïve protagonist, even with her sophisticated upbringing. She is naïve about travel, safety, love, tribalism, war, and sickness. And as readers, we are thrown in the middle of it all, too.
Also, as readers, we get a view of the corruption and violence under President Moi; the unsanitary conditions of the hospital; and military life.
Being a short book, it is quick to get through the ugliness – and still give us an inside view of the love story.
But…it was a harsh road to travel, and not an easy path to navigate or read. 3.5 stars.
December 4, 2013
She is nineteen, half black, daughter to successful but divorced parents. At Yale University she meets Miriam, a vivacious, confident twenty-one-year-old woman who, with her forceful, lively nature, takes her younger friend under her wing and introduces her to the wider world - both at home and abroad. Together, they take a year off and travel, thanks to their moneyed parents. In Africa, she begins to feel a sense of homecoming, no longer standing out with her copper colouring but "one in a great mass of long lost reflections of myself. The language was different but the skin, the way we looked moving in the colors and contours of the world, was the same."
As the two women travel across north-eastern Africa, they eventually find themselves on the island of Luma, off the coast of Kenya. Predominately Muslim to Nairobi's Christian, they settle in quickly, effortlessly. On her first night there, she meets Adé, a handsome young man who "radiated an honesty that was unfamiliar, a blend of humility and self-awareness, confidence and modesty all at once, and when he turned to face me, I gasped a little at his unselfconscious beauty." With a mouthful of sweetened spaghetti, their love affair begins, an honest bonding of two souls who find themselves in each other - as well as a new and dangerous world.
It is Adé who names her Farida. She needs an Arabic name, he tells her, and chooses this one which means "the woman who is exceptional, a jewel. There is no other like her. She stands alone." He introduces her to his family - his mother, Nuru, and her other children, his cousins and even, eventually, his father who lives on the mainland in a village of rundown huts with his four wives and their many children. Farida continues to learn the language, Swahili, and adapt to the customs of the island, but it is for Adé that she stays, while Miriam leaves for more travel.
After Farida agrees to marry Adé, there is much discussion among the women of his family and the imams in the town about how to get the permission of her parents. It is a custom and one they must respect, even though Farida knows her parents won't care. So it is decided that they must travel to America before they can marry. To do so, Adé needs a passport: no easy matter in a country run by a dictator and divided along tribal lines. It is while in mainland Kenya that disaster strikes the happy, carefree couple. Farida succumbs to a rare form of meningitis and cerebral malaria. After weeks at a local hospital, it becomes clear that she must return to America for more treatment.
Only, it's August 1990. Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait, and America launches the Gulf War in retaliation. All flights are cancelled. The only way Farida can leave is on a specially chartered plane picking up foreign nationals with connections in the right places. Her father has arranged a seat for her on the plane. But there is only one seat.
This well-written novella is a tidy homage to love and identity as it explores the all-too-human barriers between race, class, religion and nationalism. The telling is simple but rather beautiful, never overdone or portentous or flowery. Walker, a poet, brings Farida's first-person voice to life in an understated way, capturing her sense of smallness and her quiet search for a place to belong.
The West's penchant for romanticising Africa is one of the themes at the heart of this book. Farida and Miriam experience Africa differently, with different eyes and different expectations. For Farida, whose mother was born in Africa and made sure her daughter grew up with a love for all things African, it is a place that allows her to seek a sense of identity that had before been elusive.
The powerful feeling of "fitting in" is new to Farida, and blissful. She is already slipping over the line from first-world to third even before they arrive in Luma and she meets Adé. In Adé, Walker has created a true gentleman, a man respectful of his culture, his people's traditions, his religion and Farida herself. He is loving, tender, passionate, thoughtful and loyal. He's a sweetheart, and it's not hard to see how someone like Farida could fall in love with him and be so willing to give up everything she knows, the lifestyle she grew up in - electricity and washing machines and so on. At the same time, she is young and idealistic, yet she doesn't come across as impressionable. She lacks the experience that comes with age as well as the jaded cynicism, but she sees clearly and is telling her story some two decades later, with the gift of hindsight. The voice of Farida as a young woman is the voice that comes across strongly in the story, not that of her present self.
It is a long time before Farida loses her rosy glasses. The trip to Nairobi for a passport for Adé is the beginning of the end of paradise for her. First, soldiers board their bus, ransack the passengers' belongings to steal anything of value, and Farida - in her Western, American pride and arrogance - demands that they stop, she finds the nozzle of a gun pressed to her cheek. Adé has to talk them out of killing her. Later, when tanks roll through town and the streets are deserted but for one young boy whom Farida sees get shot simply for running away, the last of her innocence is stripped away. The sound of the gunshot haunts her.
It is her sense of "white privilege" that Farida loses - a privilege that she absorbed by dint of being half-white and affluent and living in America. Here in Africa, she is one of them by skin colour alone. It takes the rude awakening on the bus to make her realise that while she may subconsciously believe she possesses white privilege, it's not visible to anyone else there. It won't protect her. The one thing that lingers is the buried knowledge that if the going gets too tough, she can still leave. This, too, is part of white privilege, of being a tourist to the harsh realities of life in a place like Africa. It is something that Farida comes face-to-face with and acknowledge.
Adé is a classic story of trying to find your place in the world, of being from neither here nor there, of wanting to connect with your roots only to find that, no matter how much you want it to be otherwise, your upbringing has already shaped you. It is a simple story but rich, honest, full of feeling and the stripping away of innocence, naiveté, arrogance. After the clear flow of events throughout, I did find the ending a little vague, requiring more reading between the lines than anything that came before, which made it a bit disjointed and abrupt. The ending also seemed to strengthen the romanticisation of Africa and Farida's relationship with Adé, preserving it in the memories of youth - almost as if Farida made the decision she made not because of the actual difficulties but because the truth of those difficulties, of reality itself, was too much, the sacrifice on her part too great. I don't quite know what to make of it yet, it's something that will stew in my head for a while and would be clearer after a re-read. Overall, though, Walker's debut novel is strong and relevant, told in loving detail and narrated by a woman whose journey will resonate.
My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book via TLC Book Tours. Please note that quotes in this review are from the uncorrected proof and may appear differently in the final copy.
As the two women travel across north-eastern Africa, they eventually find themselves on the island of Luma, off the coast of Kenya. Predominately Muslim to Nairobi's Christian, they settle in quickly, effortlessly. On her first night there, she meets Adé, a handsome young man who "radiated an honesty that was unfamiliar, a blend of humility and self-awareness, confidence and modesty all at once, and when he turned to face me, I gasped a little at his unselfconscious beauty." With a mouthful of sweetened spaghetti, their love affair begins, an honest bonding of two souls who find themselves in each other - as well as a new and dangerous world.
It is Adé who names her Farida. She needs an Arabic name, he tells her, and chooses this one which means "the woman who is exceptional, a jewel. There is no other like her. She stands alone." He introduces her to his family - his mother, Nuru, and her other children, his cousins and even, eventually, his father who lives on the mainland in a village of rundown huts with his four wives and their many children. Farida continues to learn the language, Swahili, and adapt to the customs of the island, but it is for Adé that she stays, while Miriam leaves for more travel.
After Farida agrees to marry Adé, there is much discussion among the women of his family and the imams in the town about how to get the permission of her parents. It is a custom and one they must respect, even though Farida knows her parents won't care. So it is decided that they must travel to America before they can marry. To do so, Adé needs a passport: no easy matter in a country run by a dictator and divided along tribal lines. It is while in mainland Kenya that disaster strikes the happy, carefree couple. Farida succumbs to a rare form of meningitis and cerebral malaria. After weeks at a local hospital, it becomes clear that she must return to America for more treatment.
Only, it's August 1990. Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait, and America launches the Gulf War in retaliation. All flights are cancelled. The only way Farida can leave is on a specially chartered plane picking up foreign nationals with connections in the right places. Her father has arranged a seat for her on the plane. But there is only one seat.
This well-written novella is a tidy homage to love and identity as it explores the all-too-human barriers between race, class, religion and nationalism. The telling is simple but rather beautiful, never overdone or portentous or flowery. Walker, a poet, brings Farida's first-person voice to life in an understated way, capturing her sense of smallness and her quiet search for a place to belong.
The West's penchant for romanticising Africa is one of the themes at the heart of this book. Farida and Miriam experience Africa differently, with different eyes and different expectations. For Farida, whose mother was born in Africa and made sure her daughter grew up with a love for all things African, it is a place that allows her to seek a sense of identity that had before been elusive.
I know for many reasons that it is unfair, exploitive, and blasphemous to think this, but I began to feel at home there, walking between the palms, looking at the pink and purple, turquoise and orange clothes, faded but clean, fluttering on gray clotheslines above me. Some might say it was only first world romanticism causing me to see myself reflected in the faces of those to whom I could not speak. And yet at each house, even though I had no words to tie us together, a recognition between me and my hosts rose up and hung in the air, roping us together long after I had walked away. [pp. 9-10]
The powerful feeling of "fitting in" is new to Farida, and blissful. She is already slipping over the line from first-world to third even before they arrive in Luma and she meets Adé. In Adé, Walker has created a true gentleman, a man respectful of his culture, his people's traditions, his religion and Farida herself. He is loving, tender, passionate, thoughtful and loyal. He's a sweetheart, and it's not hard to see how someone like Farida could fall in love with him and be so willing to give up everything she knows, the lifestyle she grew up in - electricity and washing machines and so on. At the same time, she is young and idealistic, yet she doesn't come across as impressionable. She lacks the experience that comes with age as well as the jaded cynicism, but she sees clearly and is telling her story some two decades later, with the gift of hindsight. The voice of Farida as a young woman is the voice that comes across strongly in the story, not that of her present self.
It is a long time before Farida loses her rosy glasses. The trip to Nairobi for a passport for Adé is the beginning of the end of paradise for her. First, soldiers board their bus, ransack the passengers' belongings to steal anything of value, and Farida - in her Western, American pride and arrogance - demands that they stop, she finds the nozzle of a gun pressed to her cheek. Adé has to talk them out of killing her. Later, when tanks roll through town and the streets are deserted but for one young boy whom Farida sees get shot simply for running away, the last of her innocence is stripped away. The sound of the gunshot haunts her.
I could not imagine a day when Adé would turn against me, but I could, for the first time, imagine something far worse: death, imprisonment, or cruelty at the hands of a foreign government. Dictatorship and secreted civil wars created a terrible isolation for the people who lived within their unfolding. I saw a hideous and surreal picture of reality with no escape. Adé would not mistreat me, but I had not considered the state. And suddenly I felt less than I had yesterday, and far less than I had the week before. I was losing something. I was going dark. [p.84]
It is her sense of "white privilege" that Farida loses - a privilege that she absorbed by dint of being half-white and affluent and living in America. Here in Africa, she is one of them by skin colour alone. It takes the rude awakening on the bus to make her realise that while she may subconsciously believe she possesses white privilege, it's not visible to anyone else there. It won't protect her. The one thing that lingers is the buried knowledge that if the going gets too tough, she can still leave. This, too, is part of white privilege, of being a tourist to the harsh realities of life in a place like Africa. It is something that Farida comes face-to-face with and acknowledge.
I looked at Adé, extending the fork again and again, whispering encouragements, and I saw, for the first time, not a stranger, but a person from another place, another world. I saw someone I loved but could never really know. Adé knew how to talk murderers out of pulling the trigger. His father had abandoned him and his mother for four other wives and twice as many children. His island did not have a hospital. He made his living with precise movements of his hands and knowledge of the sky, chiseling flowers into wood for the rich, and knowing the direction of the wind as he steered his dhow. He lived in a house with no electricity and no running water, and shoveled feces from the bathroom - the hole in the ground at the back of his mother's house - every month. Five times a day Adé washed his hands and arms, knelt on a beautiful rug, and prayed to an invisible God.
But it was more than this. Yes, I could see it now. It wasn't him it was me. I had done what I swore I would not do: I had romanticized the truths of Africa. I had accepted Adé's life before I realized what it might mean for my own. [pp.94-5]
Adé is a classic story of trying to find your place in the world, of being from neither here nor there, of wanting to connect with your roots only to find that, no matter how much you want it to be otherwise, your upbringing has already shaped you. It is a simple story but rich, honest, full of feeling and the stripping away of innocence, naiveté, arrogance. After the clear flow of events throughout, I did find the ending a little vague, requiring more reading between the lines than anything that came before, which made it a bit disjointed and abrupt. The ending also seemed to strengthen the romanticisation of Africa and Farida's relationship with Adé, preserving it in the memories of youth - almost as if Farida made the decision she made not because of the actual difficulties but because the truth of those difficulties, of reality itself, was too much, the sacrifice on her part too great. I don't quite know what to make of it yet, it's something that will stew in my head for a while and would be clearer after a re-read. Overall, though, Walker's debut novel is strong and relevant, told in loving detail and narrated by a woman whose journey will resonate.
My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book via TLC Book Tours. Please note that quotes in this review are from the uncorrected proof and may appear differently in the final copy.
November 19, 2013
Disclaimer: I have lots of bias for this book.
I'm a sucker for culture. I'm a sucker for immediate, unquestionable love. Particularly when it is met with heartache.
But mostly I'm biased because this book was thesoundbooktrack to my engagement.
My then-boyfriend and I had pulled over mid-way through a road trip to stretch our legs along the California coast. I specifically brought Adé with me so that I could photograph the cover against the horizon – I am obsessed with this cover! – On the way I had spent at least twenty minutes telling my then-boyfriend how much I would be willing to purchase the cover's photograph as an oversized print. When we finally pulled over, I took out the book. "You're bringing a book on our break?" he asked.
I told him how I was going to accomplish this mission and photograph Adé against the water. He looked at me like I was silly and crazy, but let me carry on with my very niche goal.
Photograph taken (http://instagram.com/p/glb6Sisbsp/), I wandered as far as I could along the highway's tangential trails. He trailed behind me, trying to keep up. Finally we perched on a rock, surrounded by sundried ice plants and swirly cerulean sea. I held onto Adé as we gazed into the waves. We were taking it all in, having a lot of feels, when my then-boyfriend started to scoot away from me. "So, this has been a long time coming..." he said. And then I don't know what else was exchanged.
We left the coast engaged. I made sure to take Adé back with me.
Actual Review: Adé is the first book I've read by Rebecca Walker, and actually another GoodReads review criticizing that Walker borrowed too much from her own life for Adé just makes me want to read her memoir and compare notes. While I'm particularly interested stories immersed in cultures that I could never just "blend in" to and experience, I haven't read much in the way of African cultures. As an Asian diaspora in the US who had her own culture shock visiting mainland China, it was particularly interesting to read about "Farida" visiting Lamu as a foreigner.
I think there could have been more to the end. It was somewhat abrupt, but then I also think that is how we often survive tragedy forced through extenuating circumstances. We remember all the feels up to the moment, but just like I blacked out with overwhelming emotion when my now-fiancé proposed, our defense mechanisms move us along to the next moment so that we cannot dwell.
I'm a sucker for culture. I'm a sucker for immediate, unquestionable love. Particularly when it is met with heartache.
But mostly I'm biased because this book was the
My then-boyfriend and I had pulled over mid-way through a road trip to stretch our legs along the California coast. I specifically brought Adé with me so that I could photograph the cover against the horizon – I am obsessed with this cover! – On the way I had spent at least twenty minutes telling my then-boyfriend how much I would be willing to purchase the cover's photograph as an oversized print. When we finally pulled over, I took out the book. "You're bringing a book on our break?" he asked.
I told him how I was going to accomplish this mission and photograph Adé against the water. He looked at me like I was silly and crazy, but let me carry on with my very niche goal.
Photograph taken (http://instagram.com/p/glb6Sisbsp/), I wandered as far as I could along the highway's tangential trails. He trailed behind me, trying to keep up. Finally we perched on a rock, surrounded by sundried ice plants and swirly cerulean sea. I held onto Adé as we gazed into the waves. We were taking it all in, having a lot of feels, when my then-boyfriend started to scoot away from me. "So, this has been a long time coming..." he said. And then I don't know what else was exchanged.
We left the coast engaged. I made sure to take Adé back with me.
Actual Review: Adé is the first book I've read by Rebecca Walker, and actually another GoodReads review criticizing that Walker borrowed too much from her own life for Adé just makes me want to read her memoir and compare notes. While I'm particularly interested stories immersed in cultures that I could never just "blend in" to and experience, I haven't read much in the way of African cultures. As an Asian diaspora in the US who had her own culture shock visiting mainland China, it was particularly interesting to read about "Farida" visiting Lamu as a foreigner.
I think there could have been more to the end. It was somewhat abrupt, but then I also think that is how we often survive tragedy forced through extenuating circumstances. We remember all the feels up to the moment, but just like I blacked out with overwhelming emotion when my now-fiancé proposed, our defense mechanisms move us along to the next moment so that we cannot dwell.
December 4, 2013
Magical. Lyrical. Haunting. Those are the three words that came to mind from the first page of my copy of Rebecca Walker’s amazing novel Ade’, a Love Story, and by the time I was just a few more pages into the story, I was already swept into the tide of Farida’s life – from college student to world traveler to lover, to, finally, just WOMAN, she seemed as real to me as many of my own friends. I could see her in my minds eye, asking local people in various desert countries to help her broaden her vocabulary, until their words felt like her own, and I could feel her thirst for connection and passion.
Her friend Miriam also reminded me of people I knew – still know – and while I can’t say that I disliked her, there were times when she annoyed me a little. “Stop trying so hard,” I’d tell the version of her in my imagination. But then I’d remember my own feelings of being an outsider.
Ade’, the title character himself, was also very real to me, but I saw him in soft-focus, through Farida’s eyes. Maybe it helps that my mother dated an Iranian man when I was a toddler (my father was never in the picture) or that I grew up in a diverse group of people from many different cultures, but I could almost hear his accent, his speech patterns – almost smell this skin.
It’s no secret that I read in the bath a lot. Even though my copy of Ade’ was a digital copy, and an uncorrected proof version at that, courtesy of TLC Book Tours and NetGalley, I took my Kindle into the bath with me to read this novel, and didn’t come out til the water was ice cold and my fingers and toes totally pruney. Why? Because this book is THAT entrancing. The language, the settings, the characters – all so vivid and so real.
Rebecca Walker, I know from her bio, writes for Marie Claire so it’s possible that I’ve read some of her stuff without knowing it, as I’m a long-time subscriber to that magazine. At times her voice seemed incredibly familiar, and that only made me enjoy the book more.
Ade’ is a love story, and I am in love with Ade’ and with Ms. Walker’s writing. Brava!
Her friend Miriam also reminded me of people I knew – still know – and while I can’t say that I disliked her, there were times when she annoyed me a little. “Stop trying so hard,” I’d tell the version of her in my imagination. But then I’d remember my own feelings of being an outsider.
Ade’, the title character himself, was also very real to me, but I saw him in soft-focus, through Farida’s eyes. Maybe it helps that my mother dated an Iranian man when I was a toddler (my father was never in the picture) or that I grew up in a diverse group of people from many different cultures, but I could almost hear his accent, his speech patterns – almost smell this skin.
It’s no secret that I read in the bath a lot. Even though my copy of Ade’ was a digital copy, and an uncorrected proof version at that, courtesy of TLC Book Tours and NetGalley, I took my Kindle into the bath with me to read this novel, and didn’t come out til the water was ice cold and my fingers and toes totally pruney. Why? Because this book is THAT entrancing. The language, the settings, the characters – all so vivid and so real.
Rebecca Walker, I know from her bio, writes for Marie Claire so it’s possible that I’ve read some of her stuff without knowing it, as I’m a long-time subscriber to that magazine. At times her voice seemed incredibly familiar, and that only made me enjoy the book more.
Ade’ is a love story, and I am in love with Ade’ and with Ms. Walker’s writing. Brava!
March 18, 2017
I think this book is probably the best novel I've read this year, behind 'The Street' by Ann Petry. The fluidity of the story, along with the lush descriptions of Africa literally MOVED me. I am not a reader of love stories, I find them to be typical and corny; yet this book was way more than a love story. I felt it was a kindred exchange by happenstance of two people who merely belonged. So worth the purchase. Will definitely read again. I now anticipate all the works of Rebecca Walker.
July 20, 2016
An incredibly silly book that took itself way too seriously. A frustrating narrator, blissfully un-self-aware, romanticizes the third world, with an author eager to indulge her.
There's the narrator's slapdash friendship with a girlfriend from college (which is dripping with biphobia -- the narrator and her friend are briefly lovers, but purely for the sake of riling up straight men around them, and later they end the romance to get to "the meat of things -- men," because, you know, no one is ever actually interested in more than one sex, it is only ever for attention)... there's the sojourn in a quiet Egyptian town which apparently has so little internal reality that they think nothing of throwing a party for the Americans who have stayed there a couple of weeks. A party.
Then we get to a little resort island, where the narrator falls in love with Ade, a local man. Again, this is hailed as the best thing that ever happened in this tiny town, and no one has any problem with it at all, unless they are already a bad person and grr, the narrator shouldn't like them. Our narrator's friend reveals herself as the spiteful shrew that 50% of all female friends in women's literature reveal themselves to be, and says that the romance is bogus because the resort island isn't the "real" Africa, it's just a tourist trap.
The reader, meanwhile, is coming up with many more reasons why this match is a bad idea: they barely know each other a month before deciding to get married; Ade is a devout Muslim, the narrator is an atheist who was raised Jewish; she's from an upscale New York background and is traveling the world to "find herself," he's never left his island, and has never even been on an elevator. (The writer shrewdly keeps these pesky little details out of anyone's head, and the spiteful friend, who is clearly just jealous, leaves, taking any concern that this wedding is a bad idea with her.) The narrator and Ade get married and for a while all is bliss, until plot contrivances ensue to rend them apart.
The resolution is then rushed and tacky, with a desperate promise between the lovers that they will find each other again, only to end with an abrupt "that was twenty years ago," giving the reader the idea that the narrator never bothered to find Ade again, and once he was out of sight, he was way the heck out of mind, only useful for the occasional reminisce about ahh, those simpler days, those simpler little islands on the edge of Africa.
There's the narrator's slapdash friendship with a girlfriend from college (which is dripping with biphobia -- the narrator and her friend are briefly lovers, but purely for the sake of riling up straight men around them, and later they end the romance to get to "the meat of things -- men," because, you know, no one is ever actually interested in more than one sex, it is only ever for attention)... there's the sojourn in a quiet Egyptian town which apparently has so little internal reality that they think nothing of throwing a party for the Americans who have stayed there a couple of weeks. A party.
Then we get to a little resort island, where the narrator falls in love with Ade, a local man. Again, this is hailed as the best thing that ever happened in this tiny town, and no one has any problem with it at all, unless they are already a bad person and grr, the narrator shouldn't like them. Our narrator's friend reveals herself as the spiteful shrew that 50% of all female friends in women's literature reveal themselves to be, and says that the romance is bogus because the resort island isn't the "real" Africa, it's just a tourist trap.
The reader, meanwhile, is coming up with many more reasons why this match is a bad idea: they barely know each other a month before deciding to get married; Ade is a devout Muslim, the narrator is an atheist who was raised Jewish; she's from an upscale New York background and is traveling the world to "find herself," he's never left his island, and has never even been on an elevator. (The writer shrewdly keeps these pesky little details out of anyone's head, and the spiteful friend, who is clearly just jealous, leaves, taking any concern that this wedding is a bad idea with her.) The narrator and Ade get married and for a while all is bliss, until plot contrivances ensue to rend them apart.
The resolution is then rushed and tacky, with a desperate promise between the lovers that they will find each other again, only to end with an abrupt "that was twenty years ago," giving the reader the idea that the narrator never bothered to find Ade again, and once he was out of sight, he was way the heck out of mind, only useful for the occasional reminisce about ahh, those simpler days, those simpler little islands on the edge of Africa.
August 13, 2014
A TRUE LOVE STORY:
I finished this book the day I got it out of my mailbox. I have no words to describe how I felt after finishing it. I guess you could say I was in awe or shock. of course the tears came in the last pages of the book, but the last two paragraphs I was bawling. I personally have never been so moved by a book in my life, and I have a feeling this book will never leave my mind or memory. I've cried over books twice before but that was because someone was dying never had I bawled like this over a love story. And to be honest what really had me on tears was because I wanted there to be a happy ending neatly tied up with a bow, if you will. Also this book shoes the TRUE BEAUTY of Africa. (makes me want to go there lol) The author did an exceptional job explaining everywhere the girls went. To sum up my review, I give this book 5 stars. It truly was "haunting and exquisite". I have never been so moved by a book. My only question for Farida would be: "Why didn't you go back?"
I finished this book the day I got it out of my mailbox. I have no words to describe how I felt after finishing it. I guess you could say I was in awe or shock. of course the tears came in the last pages of the book, but the last two paragraphs I was bawling. I personally have never been so moved by a book in my life, and I have a feeling this book will never leave my mind or memory. I've cried over books twice before but that was because someone was dying never had I bawled like this over a love story. And to be honest what really had me on tears was because I wanted there to be a happy ending neatly tied up with a bow, if you will. Also this book shoes the TRUE BEAUTY of Africa. (makes me want to go there lol) The author did an exceptional job explaining everywhere the girls went. To sum up my review, I give this book 5 stars. It truly was "haunting and exquisite". I have never been so moved by a book. My only question for Farida would be: "Why didn't you go back?"
August 19, 2015
Well written, but annoying. It romanticized an unconvincing relationship between a privileged American Yale graduate and a Kenyan, without ever looking at the implications of the decision to marry a man who had never even been to his capital city or ridden an elevator, while she grew up between San Francisco and Manhattan (and as the daughter of Alice Walker, although it is a novel rather than a memoir). She is half Jewish and seems to blithely agree to wearing head coverings, and doesn't seem to even think about what her life as his wife will be. Of course, she ends up leaving (due to illness, but I have no doubt she would have ended up leaving regardless.) Now she looks back sentimentally 20 yrs later with no real reflection. She read like a naive, self involved, elite American without any insight into how her (to me) impetuous marriage may have affected him and his family, and we don't ever hear about the aftermath. (Oops, that was kind of harsh! Maybe if it was longer all these criticisms would have been addressed.)
April 28, 2023
The novella is unrealistically real. It certainly has its own flair, but is very much annoying as well. That is the thing about ignorant people; they gain “interesting” life experiences on the expense of others.
Read
January 30, 2022no hopes or expectations, yet still disappointment - 2022 in a nutshell?
March 7, 2021
Not what I thought it would be
I was surprised by the book. It was a really interesting perspective, and written in such a way that I didn't even realize i had read the whole book...caught up in the story. The author does an amazing job of story telling. I gave four stars because it was good for the art of storytelling, but the characters didn't draw me in, beyond how she told it, if that makes sense.
I was surprised by the book. It was a really interesting perspective, and written in such a way that I didn't even realize i had read the whole book...caught up in the story. The author does an amazing job of story telling. I gave four stars because it was good for the art of storytelling, but the characters didn't draw me in, beyond how she told it, if that makes sense.
February 17, 2023
"It was inspirational. Full of powerful people with tremendous intellects, who made remarkable contributions. Africa was a rich and looming place, and my mother made me feel through her words and actions that it belonged to me. 'It held secrets,' she said to me in her lone, quiet way. 'Things I would never hear if I did not go myself."
"What the heart desires is medicine to itself."
"I want to stay here. And read the African novels I've been lugging everywhere. The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born is as long as Anna Karinina. I want to read it in one place, sink into it. I want to write."
"'Why not draw?' he said. You are always taking pictures. Maybe some should come from inside. Not everything can be found from looking out."
"He was the Swahili boy who taught me to find joy in limitations. He showed me that home was not a physical place, but something much larger and more mysterious. Ade's love meant that even if I could not bridge the entire world, the gaps of my life were not insurmountable. I was lovable, complete just as I was. Another me, an unbroken me, was possible."
"Our house of words is on the inside now, he said. The rest was in the hands of Allah."
"What the heart desires is medicine to itself."
"I want to stay here. And read the African novels I've been lugging everywhere. The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born is as long as Anna Karinina. I want to read it in one place, sink into it. I want to write."
"'Why not draw?' he said. You are always taking pictures. Maybe some should come from inside. Not everything can be found from looking out."
"He was the Swahili boy who taught me to find joy in limitations. He showed me that home was not a physical place, but something much larger and more mysterious. Ade's love meant that even if I could not bridge the entire world, the gaps of my life were not insurmountable. I was lovable, complete just as I was. Another me, an unbroken me, was possible."
"Our house of words is on the inside now, he said. The rest was in the hands of Allah."
May 25, 2024
Beautifully written
January 18, 2014
Adé is a coming of age love story. It captured me from the first page and I didn't put it down until I was finished.
Wonderfully written Rebecca Walker creates a captivating portrait of a young American woman who travels abroad to Africa and finds love with a Swahili Muslim man. There they create their own paradise, plan to marry and are then faced with the unsettling and often violent realities of life just as the Persian Gulf war begins.
This is an extraordinary love story and tale of survival.
Adé will stay with me for a long time.
Wonderfully written Rebecca Walker creates a captivating portrait of a young American woman who travels abroad to Africa and finds love with a Swahili Muslim man. There they create their own paradise, plan to marry and are then faced with the unsettling and often violent realities of life just as the Persian Gulf war begins.
This is an extraordinary love story and tale of survival.
Adé will stay with me for a long time.
October 12, 2016
13/20
La pureté d’un amour confrontée à la violence d’un contexte politique, c’est le sujet de ce roman intense. L’auteur aborde la difficile acclimatation à une culture différente, et la difficulté pour un amour de survivre à tous ces obstacles. Ce fut une belle lecture même si la première moitié du roman m’a un peu laissée de marbre.
Ma chronique : https://myprettybooks.wordpress.com/2...
La pureté d’un amour confrontée à la violence d’un contexte politique, c’est le sujet de ce roman intense. L’auteur aborde la difficile acclimatation à une culture différente, et la difficulté pour un amour de survivre à tous ces obstacles. Ce fut une belle lecture même si la première moitié du roman m’a un peu laissée de marbre.
Ma chronique : https://myprettybooks.wordpress.com/2...
November 11, 2013
Did not like it. I still love Rebecca, but I was disappointed that she borrowed so many details from her personal life for this book. It was way too obvious to anyone who has read her memoir.
Also, it's too short to call itself a novel.
Also, it's too short to call itself a novel.
February 27, 2024
2 stars is generous. The kindest thing I can say about this is Did the author intend to portray the main male character as a “Magical Negro” our did she just stumble onto that trope and it’s interesting that it’s being used to teach a biracial character big lessons on life.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 19, 2013
Rebecca's words are seductive and whilst I didn't particularly want to read a love story, I danced with her for a 111 pages then sat down completely satisfied.
Do you remember, mpenzi?
Do you remember, mpenzi?
May 4, 2018
Beautifully written, but overall I couldn't connect with any of the characters.
February 24, 2020
Adé, Rebecca Walker
A love story in novella form about a biracial half African American half Jewish collage graduate who falls in love with a Swahili man.
The unnamed woman is traveling around Africa with her best friend when she encounters the man of her dreams on a small island off the coast of Kenya and decides to leave the first world behind. The couple’s connection is quick, intense and their love deep, but their affair is cut short when she contracts a terrible case of malaria and must fly back to the US for treatment.
I was not enthralled by this book although the writing is moody and descriptive. The main female character does and doesn’t realize she’s living out her mother’s dream of finding herself in Africa. She’s a collage grad at loose ends, a child of divorces with a parent on each coast, and not sure of who she is or where she fits in. When she meets this Swahili Muslim Adé, who has never been beyond his small island of Lamu, and the one town across the water, she’s besotted by his softness, his kindness, his beauty and his solidness. She ditches her friend who she has promised to travel with all over africa and stays on the small island learning how Adé and his family live. She even allows him to give her a good Muslim name - Farida - so she is more acceptable to his family. The two eventually decide to marry and live a simple life together on his island, forsaking all the amenities of the first world. Her mother seems happy for her, her father quite confused by her choice, and Kenya itself is not a good place for most people during the time she’s there because it’s led by a crazy dictator. Yet, she feels deeply connected to Adé. For him, she is his first and always true love. It is only when she is taken deathly ill and finds herself at a small, ill equipped hospital where nurses share needles among patients, that the young woman finally starts to contemplate what her choice entails. Eventually she must be secretly airlifted out of the country, and that’s when the two are finally separated.
This seems very autobiographical and reads like a memoir. A biracial young woman, post college, trying to find herself and her roots by visiting Africa falls in love and thinks she’s found her home. The author is well thought of and the book was well received when published. I found it sweet and affecting but not a brilliant rendition of a love story. I didn’t like her writing as much as other reviewers.
#NewYearsResolution reading the backlog on my kindle.
A love story in novella form about a biracial half African American half Jewish collage graduate who falls in love with a Swahili man.
The unnamed woman is traveling around Africa with her best friend when she encounters the man of her dreams on a small island off the coast of Kenya and decides to leave the first world behind. The couple’s connection is quick, intense and their love deep, but their affair is cut short when she contracts a terrible case of malaria and must fly back to the US for treatment.
I was not enthralled by this book although the writing is moody and descriptive. The main female character does and doesn’t realize she’s living out her mother’s dream of finding herself in Africa. She’s a collage grad at loose ends, a child of divorces with a parent on each coast, and not sure of who she is or where she fits in. When she meets this Swahili Muslim Adé, who has never been beyond his small island of Lamu, and the one town across the water, she’s besotted by his softness, his kindness, his beauty and his solidness. She ditches her friend who she has promised to travel with all over africa and stays on the small island learning how Adé and his family live. She even allows him to give her a good Muslim name - Farida - so she is more acceptable to his family. The two eventually decide to marry and live a simple life together on his island, forsaking all the amenities of the first world. Her mother seems happy for her, her father quite confused by her choice, and Kenya itself is not a good place for most people during the time she’s there because it’s led by a crazy dictator. Yet, she feels deeply connected to Adé. For him, she is his first and always true love. It is only when she is taken deathly ill and finds herself at a small, ill equipped hospital where nurses share needles among patients, that the young woman finally starts to contemplate what her choice entails. Eventually she must be secretly airlifted out of the country, and that’s when the two are finally separated.
This seems very autobiographical and reads like a memoir. A biracial young woman, post college, trying to find herself and her roots by visiting Africa falls in love and thinks she’s found her home. The author is well thought of and the book was well received when published. I found it sweet and affecting but not a brilliant rendition of a love story. I didn’t like her writing as much as other reviewers.
#NewYearsResolution reading the backlog on my kindle.
November 29, 2019
Exquisite! One of the most beautiful love stories I've ever read, and among the top five I've read this year. The prose is lyrical, the story painfully real and timely. It speaks to our human predilection for idealizing and romanticizing and stereotyping ... glossing over the real and specific. I have grown increasingly troubled by my own tendency, through ignorance, to refer to anything from the continent of Africa as African, as if it were some monolithic place, a giant country, rather than fifty-four countries with many distinct cultures and languages. That's so narrow of me. This slender novel drives home the error of doing that like a stiletto to the heart. It particularizes, and it tears down some of the most common stereotypes. It's quite simply beautiful. This one deserves to be a movie. Perhaps the closest book to this, from my reading experience, is Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Poignant would be a good descriptor.
January 31, 2025
i met rebecca walker over a decade ago when she released this book. i was a bright eyed, excitable college student who loved her talk about writing, her mom and the book. i waited patiently to get this book signed by her and proceeded to carry it around with me all night as i rushed to meet up with friends after.
i remember not liking the book very much and being bummed, but still holding onto it all these years.
i picked it up to re-read and wow, has it aged poorly. biphobia/homophobia, racism, stereotypes, tropes, bad story telling, uninteresting characters, submissive women, etc. are all shockingly regressive from a daughter of a well-know, bisexual feminist icon. i’ll give it to the free little library, since some other readers found value in it. so bummed.
i remember not liking the book very much and being bummed, but still holding onto it all these years.
i picked it up to re-read and wow, has it aged poorly. biphobia/homophobia, racism, stereotypes, tropes, bad story telling, uninteresting characters, submissive women, etc. are all shockingly regressive from a daughter of a well-know, bisexual feminist icon. i’ll give it to the free little library, since some other readers found value in it. so bummed.
November 30, 2025
A beautiful, beautiful love story. My copy had loads of notes and underlined passages and it was delightful to slow down and read another reader’s discoveries. This is a short book so it was possible to follow the story, my reactions and another reader’s thoughts without getting lost. Maybe a bit like seeing a book into film.
I don’t read many love stories so this one, where the lovers are parted by circumstances not of their making, was urgent, compulsive and sad. However, the protagonist’s self revelations completed the story. It is far more than American entitlement. It is soul seeking and creating awareness for the rest of her life.
I will be on the lookout for more treasures from Rebecca Walker.
I don’t read many love stories so this one, where the lovers are parted by circumstances not of their making, was urgent, compulsive and sad. However, the protagonist’s self revelations completed the story. It is far more than American entitlement. It is soul seeking and creating awareness for the rest of her life.
I will be on the lookout for more treasures from Rebecca Walker.
November 5, 2025
This is a short novel I read in one day. It begins with two girl school room mates who become lovers, sort if, to turn on guys. Then it turns into a very well written love affair story between the narrator and a Swahili man she meets while on vacation with her girlfriend.. The writing is great, I felt like I was there. I didn't like the abrupt "that was 20 years ago" ending, though
June 13, 2018
This book is very short, but I hardly noticed because there is so much story packed into the few pages that are offered. It is not the overly dramatic love story that I am use to, but it is bright, vivid and beautifully real. I am looking forward to whatever else Rebecca Walker has to offer.
November 20, 2019
Indigo
Incredible tale of love fantasy, hot afternoons, cool night strolls, ocean waves. Then the reality of cultural and history eroding a future.
A relationship we all remember in our dreams henceforth
Incredible tale of love fantasy, hot afternoons, cool night strolls, ocean waves. Then the reality of cultural and history eroding a future.
A relationship we all remember in our dreams henceforth
July 24, 2021
Ade is written by Rebecca Walker. That is why I started reading it. But I will remember it because it felt so real. The characters are flesh and blood. You can hear the sounds and smell all the scents. Thank you, Ms Walker, Rebecca. Yasher Koach
August 18, 2025
Part of me read this as a “poor little rich girl” story, yet a larger part recognized it as a genuinely vulnerable coming-of-age tale—one that reconciles travel and the African diaspora with unguarded candor.
June 29, 2017
It is awesome to read a piece by a true writer whose love for words is evident by my transportation to the setting of the book.
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