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  Title: Powder Necklace Author: Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond Genre: Young Adult Fiction Publishers: Washington Square Press Pages: 280 Year of Publication: 2010 Country: Britain, Ghana, USA Where is home? Where your parents come from? Or where you were born? Or where one chooses to call home? The quest for an identity, for belonging to a group, either based on colour or language or thought, has become a quest that has proved and would continue to prove insurmountable. It would be with us for many generations to come, until such a day when we shall wake up and say 'We are people of the earth'.  Powder Necklace is a coming of age story about a young girl whose divorced Ghanaian parents, living on opposite sides of the world (America and England), was herself born in England. Does she become English? Of course that's how she described herself, at least that's how she felt when her 'overprotective' mother sent her to Ghana after seeing her with a boy in thei...

Following my interview with Tendai Huchu, I continue today with another interview from the author of  Powder Necklace ,  Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond . Can you tell us something about yourself (place of birth, school and anything in between)? I was the only black baby born in the small town of Plattsburgh, New York so I made the paper, my mother tells me. A few years later, my parents moved to New York City and I grew up in Queens for most of my childhood. At 12, my parents decided to send me and my siblings to secondary school in Ghana. It was a life-changing experience for me--even then I knew I would write about it. I even said as much to a classmate and she told me "Just don't go and exaggerate." What particularly motivated you to write this novel? And what motivates you to write in general? I needed to get this story for a number of reasons. 1: I wanted to expose the superiority complex people in the West have concerning Africa. 2: I wanted to make the connection that ju...

I continue what I started yesterday, to blog five new and first time books from five different authors from three countries. Yesterday I talked about the  duo from Zimbabwe: Tendai and Bryony . Today, I come home, Ghana. It is unfortunate that the volume of book publication (literary, not nursery rhymes produced in a corner shop) in Ghana has taken a negative turn and I hope that by the institution of the  Burt Awards , new writers would be challenged enough to pick up the pen and put something delectable on paper. Powder Necklace by Ekua Brew-Hammond About the Author: "As a kid, I lived in Ghana for three years where I attended boarding school and encountered a small group of kids whose parents had also sent them to Ghana from Europe and the States. I wanted to write a book about that unique hybrid experience of being from two places at the same time, crisscrossing the globe to visit family 'back home' and on other dots of the map, and figuring out how to answer when p...