Door of No Return by Kwame Alexander
A boy is in Africa playing around as boys do. He goes to school and has an English teacher that expects him to speak proper English. He has typical struggles as a kid. Then he and some others captured by some other Africans who take him to some white people that treat him poorly. They are no longer treated like humans, but are to launched into the life of slavery.
People have mostly lived locally within Africa. They don't understand why a teacher would want them to speak English. It can at times be unclear whether or not parts are dreams or real. There are expected family relationships and conflicts with some type of wrestling match. In the end people are hauled away in a boat. (Is it a slave ship? Or something similarly bad.) It was a little bit difficult to figure out what is going on.
Old Drift is an amalgam of interrelated stories tied together in a novel. It follows families in southern Africa from the colonial times to the present. The focus is primarily on the women, their reproductive systems and their influence in the time period. It feels like an "outsider" quasi-romantizaiton of Africa. Mosqiuitos also play a key role in the story. Both mosquitos and and humans are trying to mate, reproduce and eat. In the end, there is an attempt to perform a mass vaccination via drones, with some unintended consequences.
