Reviews

A semiautobiographical first novel about a Nigerian girl's adjustment to life at an English boarding school, this is an affecting and mordant appraisal of British social mores of the '50s. Remi is six when she is deposited at the upper-crust Chilcott Manor School (where the uniform tunic is ``nigger brown''). There, the former darling of a close-knit and aristocratic Lagos family must endure the scrutiny and derision of her classmates, one of whom spreads the word that ``the black rubs off.'' Tracing Remi's adaptions to life among the British while she maintains the inevitable distance of the outsider, Bedford establishes a simultaneously wistful and cynical piquancy. Even when Remi seems to have fully assimilated, she is asked to dance by a young man who adds, ``Are you considered attractive in your own country?'' Bedford, a native of Nigeria who moved to Britain as a child and now lives in London, has written a wise and provocative book that might even prompt some soul-searching in the social circles she has skewered. (Oct.)

Winsome Remi narrates Bedford's autobiographical debut novel. The heedlessly pampered daughter of a wealthy Nigerian family, Remi gets yanked from her laughing nurses and stately grandmother at her father's command and is taken to England by her white step-grandmother. Suddenly, she becomes outsized, naive, and--most damningly--black. At boarding school, Remi comes to understand the dynamics of stereotyping. She learns anger and, blessedly, amusement. The book falters toward the end, as Remi's voice occasionally lapses into time-consuming reportage, taking her from six to 16 in a hurry. She ends her story confident and proud among fellow Londoners of color. The sympathetic, witty narrator and the issues her story raises recommend this flawed but pleasing, exuberant novel, particularly to YA audiences.-- Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio