Just published today, a fine review of Busara Road in Fiction Writers Review. The reviewer, Ellen Prentiss Campbell, offers a detailed overview of the book and a discussion of some of the challenges a novel of this sort faces. Here's an excerpt:
Limited knowledge, understanding, and perspective are among the inherent challenges for a novelist employing a child’s point of view, especially in historical fiction. It is additionally challenging, even risky, to draw closely on personal childhood experience. After all, “what happened” doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the arc of story. Yet Sanders successfully navigates these challenges, in part by using memory as inspiration and jumping off point, exposing Mark [the protagonist] “more directly to the dark repercussions” of Kenya’s past than [Sanders] was himself during his much more secure childhood sojourn.
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