A thrilling novel about an African girl and her best friend attending an English boarding school and their exploration of a world they can neither understand nor control.

The narrator of this novel is Ajuba, a young woman in her twenties from Ghana, who is trying to deal with the events that occurred a decade earlier. What happened had affected her deeply. This is a novel about her childhood, but not a children’s or young adult novel. Ajuba brings her adult thinking to the telling of her story. She knows the psychological jargon that removes all guilt from her, but the hatred she felt resulted in “an act of devastating violence that I deeply regret.” Her story is a complex and chilling psychological narrative, and as Ajuba warns us at the beginning, not one with a happy ending. Excellent writing keeps it from ever being dreary or macabre.

Ajuba was twelve when her father brought her to a boarding school in England where she develops a close friendship with Polly, an English girl whose family is renovating an old country house nearby. Thrilled to be included in their activities, Ajuba spent much time with the family. At first they seemed to be perfect to her, but the conflict that developed between the parents brought back Ajuba’s memories of her own parents, memories that she is trying to deny and forget. She knew about how “errant fathers unable to take responsibility for disintegrating wives, pass their burdens on to their daughters.” The tension in Polly’s family is heightened by the girls’ discovery of human bones in the attic of the house. They become obsessed with their investigation into who had been murdered and why. Avidly reading about “true murder,” they create a game of investigation that “as much about making us fearful as about easing our fear.” As the family conflict intensifies, Ajuba has dreams and visions which blur her sense of what is real, but no one listens to her warnings. She becomes “a fly caught between mother and daughter in their web.”

Yaba Badoe was born in Ghana and, like Ajuba, attended an English boarding school. Working in both Africa and Great Britain, she has been a journalist for BBC and is a filmmaker. Her film about women in Ghana exiled from their villages as witches has won various prizes. She has also written about African women in film in a journal called Feminist Africa. [ I found this journal fascinating and want to explore it further.]

On the surface, True Murder seems unconnected with Africa. Some of Ajuba’s perspectives are rooted in her African world, but she was raised in what seems to have been a westernized family and was protected from racist discrimination in England. Badoe makes clear, however, that her being African is critical to the story. Although the book is sometimes called a mystery novel or a coming of age story, she describes her novel as
a psychological thriller in the Gothic mystery tradition. A nervous heroine determined to resolve a mystery as it unfolds in the English countryside is the stock in trade of Gothic melodrama. However, once the heroine is an African, another layer is added which I hope enriches the genre, making it very much of today.

Badoe also identifies the intense adolescent friendship between Ajuba and Polly with its “ambivalence and attraction” as the central theme of the book. Other themes concern family relationships, especially mother-daughter relations, and the powerlessness of adolescent girls.

When her mother is taken to hospital, eleven-year-old Ajuba is placed at a Devon boarding school.

Her memories of Ghana are of the house on Kuku hill and the growing rift between her parents, of how her mother had become increasingly jealous and had taken to stalking through the house during thunderstorms, trying to glimpse the faces of her husband’s lovers in mirrors during flashes of lightning.

Polly Venus is a charismatic new American student who Ajuba is asked to help settle in. But it quickly becomes clear that Polly is more than capable of looking after herself. She introduces a new game called True Murder. Inspired by a lurid magazine of that name the game quickly becomes a favourite with all the girls.

During half term Polly invites Ajuba to her new home.

The Venus family have taken Graylings, previously the mansion home of the late Miss Fielding and her companion Miss Edith. Miss Edith now lives in the Gatehouse and Ajuba is fascinated to discover that she is sleeping in what used to be Miss Edith’s room. One wet afternoon leads to the girls exploring the attic where they make the grisly discovery of some bones stitched into an old coat.

This discovery leads to the recommencement of the game of True Murder, with Miss Edith now a prime suspect.

The game is played against an increasingly tense atmosphere created by the disintegration of the relationship of Polly’s parents. Polly and her brother are unable or unwilling to accept that there’s anything more than insignificant bickering going on between their parents, while Ajuba witnesses scenes which force her to relive the nightmare of her own parents’ break up and her mother’s descent into madness.

The scenes portraying the anguish of Isobel Venus and her revenge have a nightmarish, almost hallucinatory quality.

A striking and memorable debut. ( )

Two pre-teens, Polly and Ajuba, become best friends, and take what seems to me to be a pretty normal interest in detective stories. Ajuba's life has already been touched by tragedy, the attempted suicide of her mother, but Polly claims to have seen a real dead body when her family was living in America.

In this, her abiding passion, her fascination with violent death, I was a helpless accomplice. The pile of comics I had rummaged through on her first day at school, and continued to mull over whenever the opportunity presented itself, were the source of Polly's hold over us, especially me. She was an enthusiastic subscriber to True Murder, an American monthly made up of features and comic strips of the world's most sensational killings.

When they become best friends, Ajuba begins to be included in Polly's weekends home, and she finds Polly's family magical, and wonders that such love and happiness can exist. But there are hints that the happiness will not last.

One of the really interesting aspects of this book, apart from the various tragic events, is the use of Ghanaian folklore and beliefs, such as a belief in witchcraft, the fear of seeing the images of the dead in a mirror and so on.

The story is told from the p.o.v. of Ajuba at eighteen years of age, looking back to events that occurred seven years earlier. The voice is of a wiser person than the eleven year old to whom the events of the story happened, but nevertheless a person damaged by her encounters with death.

A rather startling read, a very strong debut. ( )