Unmaking Grace

by Barbara Boswell

Overview

Family secrets run deep for Grace, a young girl growing up in Cape Town during the 1980s. Her family secrets spill over into adulthood, and threaten to ruin the respectable life she has built for herself.

When an old childhood friend emerges after disappearing a decade earlier during a clash with apartheid riot police in the Cape Flats, where South Africa’s coloured community makes its home, Grace’s memories of her childhood come rushing back, and she is confronted, once again, with the loss that has shaped her. She has to face up to the truth or continue to live a lie—but the choice is not straightforward. Unmaking Grace is an intimate portrayal of violence, both personal and political, and its legacy on one person’s life. It meditates on the long shadow cast by personal trauma, showing the inter-generational imprint of violence and loss on people’s lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946395238
Publisher:	Catalyst Press
Publication date:	12/10/2019
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Barbara Boswell is an educator and literary activist. She is an alumna of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she lived for several years, and has taught at universities in both the USA and South Africa. Barbara is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Cape Town, where she teaches Black women's diasporic literature, African feminist literary theory, and gender and sexuality.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A bold rendering of the swathes of emotional terrain that lie between victim and abuser, child and adult, husband and wife, good and bad, past and present – a deeply compelling and important story.” — Yewande Omotoso, author of Bom Boy and The Woman Next Door

"Barbara Boswell's ,Unmaking Grace is a novel of constant questioning. Moving and thought-provoking, the narrative takes the reader on a journey of becoming not only for the country, South Africa, but also for the women who struggle for a sense of themselves." —Merle Collins, author of Angel and The Ladies Are Upstairs

Editorial Reviews

"The novel creates drama while confronting intersecting systemic oppressions and intergenerational trauma by foregrounding its characters' needs, wants, wounds, and aspirations. The prose is taut with both clarity and complexity. A smart, compassionate portrayal of one woman's quest to end the cycle of violence." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2019-09-30
A girl comes of age as South Africa transitions from apartheid to democracy and the violence of her home life parallels the terror of the outside world.

Fourteen-year-old Grace falls for her neighbor Johnny, but their youthful romance is short-lived. Authorities of the apartheid regime detain Johnny during a raid of student protesters. Meanwhile, Grace's family life descends into chaos as her father's physical and emotional abuse escalates. By the time Nelson Mandela becomes president of a new South Africa and Johnny resurfaces more than a decade later, Grace has married her college sweetheart and become a mother. She has created the picture-perfect life, but her past proves too powerful to suppress. The first part of the novel takes place in 1985, unfolding from Grace's and her father's alternating points of view. Mary, Grace's mother, must figure out how to protect herself and Grace with few resources beyond her wits; Patrick, Grace's father, is full of a rage that consumes his hopes of ever being a decent family man. Grace, their only child, must make sense of how the people responsible for her well-being cause such harm. Part 2 is all about a grown-up Grace in 1997, and Boswell renders her conflicting emotions and actions with vivid language as Grace risks the new, safe life she has built to be with her first love. "Somewhere in her body, that body made up not of platelets and cells but of memory and forgetting, of love and the places that shape, a nerve jangled," Boswell writes as Grace and Johnny are reunited. The author does not hold back on how domestic violence operates, on how survivors of abuse, like Grace's father and Johnny, so often become perpetrators of abuse themselves. While the novel is not gratuitous, it is graphic; there are some harrowing scenes, but this book is not medicine that needs be swallowed because of the importance of the issues at hand. The novel creates drama while confronting intersecting systemic oppressions and intergenerational trauma by foregrounding its characters' needs, wants, wounds, and aspirations. The prose is taut with both clarity and complexity.

A smart, compassionate portrayal of one woman's quest to end the cycle of violence.

Kirkus Reviews