This book started out beautifully. Teenage Lila is a native Londoner, being raised by her divorced Ghanaian immigrant mother. But when Lila invites a boy over to play video games after school, her mother packs her off to Ghana for high school, saying she "needs a break" from Lila's troublesome ways. Lila suffers not only culture shock but identity confusion as she adjusts to Ghanaian culture and school for six months before her mother whisks her back to London and then packs her off again, this time to her Ghanaian father in the U.S. The best part of the book is Lila's story of her life at a Ghanaian high school. It speaks to the identity confusion of immigrant children as well as the inevitable confusions of growing up. But the last part of the book, when Lila goes to live with her father, is relatively undeveloped. And the ending is a disappointment, tacked on wish-fulfillment. ( )

This first novel is set partly in London, partly in Ghana, and partly in the US. Lila is the daughter of immigrant parents from Ghana, living in London with her mother at the beginning of the novel. Her father is absent from her life except for infrequent phone calls. At age 12, Lila is sent by her mother to Ghana to her aunt's and then to boarding school "for her own good." Lila doesn't perceive this change as good, and throughout the novel, adults' decisions make no sense to her and seem to take no account of her wants or needs.

Why did Lila's parents divorce? Why isn't her father more present in her life? Since Lila thinks initially that she knows why her mother sends her away, she is reasonably angry when she returns home to find her mother has committed a variation of the "mistake" she thought Lila made. Where is home for Lila? Dislocation and identity are themes throughout the book, and I wish they had been explored in more depth.

I wanted to like this novel better than I did. Though many of the situations were believable, I found the ending of the novel too tidy and I didn't connect emotionally with Lila. Something about the writing kept her (and the rest of the characters) disconnected from me. This is a first novel, and I'm willing to check out a second one, but I hope the writing and characterization improve. ( )