Into the Go-Slow / Bridgett M. Davis.

Title :

Into the Go-Slow

Author:

Davis, Bridgett M.

Format:

Books

Summary:

It's 1986 and twenty-one-year-old Angie continues to mourn the death of her brilliant and radical sister Ella. On impulse, she travels from Detroit to the place where Ella tragically died four years before in Nigeria. She retraces her sister's steps, all the while navigating the chaotic landscape of a major African country on the brink of democracy careening toward a coup d'état. At the center of this quest is a love affair that upends everything Angie thought she knew about herself. Against a backdrop of Nigeria's infamous go-slow traffic as wild and surprising as a Fela lyric Angie begins to unravel the mysteries of the past, and opens herself up to love and life after Ella.

Language:

English

Language Note:

Text in English.

ISBN - ISSN:

9781558618640

1558618643

Physical Description:

360 pages ; 21 cm

Subject:

African Americans -- Michigan -- Detroit -- Fiction.

African Americans -- Nigeria -- Fiction.

Families -- Michigan -- Detroit -- Fiction.

First Title value, for Searching:

Into the Go-Slow / Bridgett M. Davis.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Audience	Home Location	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Central	Adult	Fiction	Book	DAVIS	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

A young black woman visits Africa on a quest for peace, meaning, and love in "a beautiful allegory at the heart of a realist novel" (Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas).

In 1986 Detroit, twenty-one-year-old Angie is still mourning the death of her brilliant, radical sister, Ella, when she impulsively decides to pack up and go to the place where Ella tragically died four years before: Nigeria. There, Angie retraces her sister's steps, all the while navigating the chaotic landscape of a major African country on the brink of democracy and careening toward a coup d'état.

At the center of her quest is a love affair that upends everything Angie thought she knew about herself. Against a backdrop of Nigeria's infamous "go-slow"--traffic as wild and unpredictable as the country itself--Angie begins to unravel the mysteries of the past, and opens herself up to love and life after Ella.

Author Notes

Bridgett M. Davis is the author of the memoir The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life In The Detroit Numbers, as well as the two novels Into the Go-Slow and Shifting Through Neutral, which was shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Award. She is writer/director of the award-winning feature film Naked Acts, and a creative writing and journalism professor at Baruch College - City University of New York, where she is director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Millions, Salon, LitHub, Real Simple, and O, The Oprah Magazine. A graduate of Spelman College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Reviews (2)

Kirkus Review

Davis (Shifting Through Neutral, 2005) explores the ambivalent, often troubling experiences of African-Americans in Africa through the lens of a young woman who, having grown up during the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s and '70s, struggles to find her place in the world during the less idealistic '80s. Angie is at loose ends after graduating from Wayne State University in 1986. Her encounter with a Nigerian man who knew her oldest sister, Ella, during her student-activist days in Detroit a decade earlier stirs up Angie's memories of growing up the youngest of three girls in a middle-class family: not only the way she idolized brilliant but dangerously obsessive Ella, seven years her senior and their father's favorite before his early death of a heart attack; but also the havoc Ella wreaked on the family when she fell into drug addiction after dropping out of the University of Michigan. After Ella finally went clean, she and her boyfriend, Nigel, traveled to Nigeria, where she seemed to create a wonderful life as a journalist until she was fatally struck by a car while crossing the street shortly before Angie graduated from high school. Angie is still wallowing in her sister's death. Now, over the objections of her mother, Angie decides to visit Nigeria to retrace Ella's final days. She doesn't find the pan-African paradise she imagined from Ella's letters. She's excited to find black people in charge, but her nave, self-absorbed idealism is shaken by the squalor and the corruption she keeps finding, not to mention her own physical discomfort away from American creature comforts. Finally she finds Nigel, who helps Angie know the real Ella and frees her to envision her own future. The difficult intellectual questions Davis raises about personal identity and an African-American's relation to contemporary Africa are particularly resonant given Nigeria's current woes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Davis' (Shifting through Neutral, 2004) second novel is a captivating coming-of-age tale of a young black woman, Angie Mackenzie, a recent graduate of Wayne State in Detroit, who is holding down a sales-clerk job and wondering where her life is headed. Angie still lives with her widowed mother. Her older sister, Denise, lives in Atlanta. The third sister, Ella, the unpredictable wild child, became a black activist in the early 1980s, journeyed to Nigeria and became a well-known feminist journalist, returned to the U.S., became a heroin addict, then, after extensive rehab, went back to Nigeria, where she was killed a short time later in a hit-and-run accident. Angie was devoted to Ella and decides to retrace her steps to Africa to experience the world as her sister did seven years earlier. Davis paints a vivid portrait of Lagos: its poverty, beauty, corruption, and go-slow approach to life. Angie does learn what she came to Africa to discover, and feeling enlightened, she is ready to begin the next phase of her own life.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2014 Booklist