Kathleen’s Reviews > The Old Drift > Status Update

Hats off to narrator Andoh: her ability to code-switch between South African / Zim, American, and British-educated Zambian accents is bang on and so funny 🤣🤩

Things no one asked for: personified mosquitos

Oi! We may have a good egg! Balaji is devoted to his wife and a compassionate girl dad. Huzzah for the mwenye ♥️

You keep hoping that one of the newly introduced little children will turn out hopeful and loving. But how can that be possible with compounding generations of parental neglect

Are all men in this saga casually, cruelly irresponsible? I can’t get over Matha, and her daughter Sylvia’s starting out like another victim 😔

Astronaut training! Okay that was unexpected

Another disabled girl pitied by a young man, whisked away to Zambia, left to languish as a neglected housewife, husband matures to enjoy lording power over her. Ooh wait I wonder what will happen to the girl in the NEXT story 😒

Sibilla: I live in constant dread of something awful happening to this girl. Such is the plight of young girls in modern novels. Loving Adjoa Andoh’s theatrical narration, though, including the Italian accent

Excellent setup for follow-on, interconnected stories. The alliteration is starting to grind on me just a bit… I love poetic turns of phrase, but I worry about having an English professor already musing on linguistic origins in Hour 1 of a 20-hour listening journey…

Ugh disgusting colonial explorer men. How do you travel on a life-or-death journey for months and fail to connect with the other humans on the journey over a dog? I like how Clark’s character, though, was inspired by a real Zambezi autobiography. Wazungu… indeed we are the wanderers. Less romantically… homeless 😅