A Girl Named Disaster

Title: A Girl Named Disaster

Author: Nancy Farmer

Genre: Historic Fiction

Comments: The book that I started reading this week is called A Girl Named Disaster, and it is about a teenage girl living in an African village near Zimbabwe around the 1980s. So, far I have read seventy pages of the book and I am really enjoying it. This far into the book, the author has mostly described the life in a small African village, as well as the traditions and cultures of the people. Nhamo is a girl who is being raised in the village by her aunts and her uncles, because she has lost her parents. Her mother was killed by a leopard, and after her mother's death, her father went to Zimbabwe, to work. However, because she has no parents, Nhamo is being treated differently from her cousins and friends. She is the one doing most of the chores, and she is the one who gets sent into the dangerous depths of the forest to look for firewood and fruit. Even though Nhamo has lost her mother at a very young age, and doesn't quite remember her, she frequently visits a deserted village, not far away from her own, where she believes she can talk with her mother's spirit. Nhamo goes there when she is angry, sad, annoyed, etc.
Around the fourth chapter, a dreadful illness, cholera, strikes the village when some of Nhamo's uncle Kufa's relatives come to visit. The horrible virus kills many in the village, and the tensions in the village become bigger, as most of the responsability rests on Nhamo's shoulders, as she is one of the few who didn't catch the disease. However, the fights and arguments stop for a little while, when fear spreads through the village, when Nhamo's uncle, Kufa, discovers leopard prints on his sister's grave.
When the cholera passes, everything seems to be back to normal, but Nhamo starts realizing that everyone seems torn apart, and that their small village is not as happy and carefree as it used to be.