Aquarian Dawn
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Winner, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year: Young Adult Fiction!
In Nigeria-born, America-based author Ebele Chizea’s stunning debut novel, teenager Ada and her mother flee the civil war of their West African home and come to America in 1966, where Ada soon discovers—and blossoms within—the US counterculture movement, developing a drive for anti-war activism which she takes with her back to Nabuka only to uncover new truths about herself as well as family secrets that threaten to shatter her plans for the future.
While protesting the Vietnam war in America, Ada forges friendships with other nonconformist youth: free-spirited Stacey, a boisterous hippie, and Sal, a philosophical wanderlust. Soon she seeks independence from her mother, love on her own terms, as well as sexual autonomy. College provides Ada with opportunities for academic success, personal experimentation, and full independence, as well as heartbreak. Despite loss and grief over a decade, Ada’s heart becomes her own true compass and guides her to fully become the leader and activist she’d always been deep inside.
Chizea's brilliant prose and storytelling skills are fully apparent as she reveals a young woman's struggle to find balance in her life and in herself while straddling physical and social borders of two distinctly different cultures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beginning in 1966 and ending in 1975, Chizea's ambitious debut follows a West African 15-year-old from fictional country Nabuka, who relocates to Pennsylvania to escape impending civil war. Ada Ekene and her newly single mother have just arrived in "small, quaint" Greensberg. There, Ada struggles to connect with her mother, who has grown emotionally distant since the move, and longs for her extended family back home, all while making new friends and immersing herself in U.S. culture. In the four years she lives in the U.S., she experiences romance, experiments with drugs, and attends Vietnam War protests. When her former stepfather dies in 1970 while fighting in the Nabuka civil war, Ada and her mother return to their home country to bury him, and Ada embarks on a mission to find her biological father, of whom she knows very little. Chizea only briefly touches upon Nabuka's cultural worldbuilding and Ada's myriad intertwining relationship conflicts, such as her search for her birth father, making these facets read as underdeveloped. Nevertheless, this character-driven volume tackles themes such as abandonment, belonging, loss, and racism via a complexly written protagonist whose charismatic personality invests readers from the very first page. Ages 14–up.
