I am going to up-front and let you all know that I read this book for a class about post-colonial coming-of-age novels so my opinions of it have a lot to do with what we have discussed in that class.
Nervous Conditions was an incredibly stereotypical book, in my opinion. Nothing that happened surprised me and none of the opinions stated were at all surprising to me. Nervous Conditions tells the story of an African girl living in Zimbabwe and her first acceptance and then slow rejection of white colonial culture. I found the first two-thirds of the book to be quite slow and filled with the stereotypical moments of a post-colonial coming-of-age novel, but the ending actually picked up and introduced some new ideas that were interesting and some moments of choice making that I appreciated.
All that said, the writing throughout the book is quite nice. Dangarembga does a great job of writing about a world that I knew very little about in a way that is incredibly easy to understand. She really immersed me in the two conflicting worlds. Parts of this book felt like an anthropological essay, giving me sight into the lives of these people and seeing their views on things that we take for granted.
I am giving this book 3 Sequinbeasts.
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