Read something that shakes up my complacency

During a pre-birthday gathering I'd been admiring a friends well stocked bookshelves, and asking if they had read anything interesting recently. A prolific reader, she reeled off a number of "good books". The conversation then intertwined the 50at50 challenge, and my desire to do things that took me out of the ordinary, both in the physical and mental sense.

"I could recommend a few books that would shake up your complacency". And so another challenge was accepted.

In fact I received three books from this thoughtful couple. The first now completed. This is not a book review, but it did change my view of history, and how a life and that of generations to follow can be impacted. Essentially the generational stories of two sisters, one sold into slavery the other a slave trader's wife.

My favourite passage:


Now, keeping her head down and fighting back tears as Tisha and her friends called her "white girl", Marjorie was made aware, yet again, that here "white" could be the way a person talked; "black" the music a person listened to. In Ghana you coud only be what you were, what your skin announced to the world.