Neo’s love for music eventually compels her to sneak out to a bar where Umzi Radio will broadcast live, and propels her into the lives of a band called Tale and the Storytellers, whose music moves her deeply, and whose lead singer, Tale, she immediately becomes infatuated with. Her relationship to music, as both entertainment and escape, is deeply felt in every part of her life. Benwell uses lovely, poetic language to describe how deeply music entwines with the mundanities of Neo’s life: her boredom doing chores at her mother’s salon, her complicated relationship with her best friend, and her frustration that her parents do not see her music dreams as realistic. The book lures you in with a familiar-feeling story of a young girl-fifteen-year-old Neo-whose dreams are ill-matched to her parents’ expectations: Neo is obsessed with music, and longs to one day work for Umzi Radio, the local station that broadcasts to her hometown of Kayelitsha. Kaleidoscope Song is set in modern-day South Africa-the “rainbow nation” of post-apartheid that, we gradually discover, still suffers from forms of prejudice that manifest themselves in terrifying ways.
And in Fox Benwell’s novel Kaleidoscope Song, we see a protagonist who, in the face of horrific violence and prejudice, quietly rebels against the status quo to try to make life better for herself and others like her. The three young Aboriginal girls in Rabbit-Proof Fence flee on foot from the government that stole them from their mothers.
LIKE A KALEIDOSCOPE SONG FULL
Half the Sky is full of women who struggle up from a world literally designed to put them down. But the reason these stories leave such an impression, I suspect, is that the more horrible the struggle, the more heroic are those who overcome it. Of course, these things are as inexplicable as they are cruel. I remember after watching the latter, I called my mother in a helpless rage-I suppose because, in some childish way, I expected her to somehow make sense of the terrible things human beings do to one another.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky comes to mind as an example the 2002 film Rabbit-Proof Fence is another.
Welcome to On Beyond Katniss, a column exclusively for the heroic young women of YA who face incredible odds, shatter expectations, and bring something new to a genre that’s already overflowing with amazing female characters.Įvery once in a while, I’ll read or see something that infuriates me so much it leaves an indelible impression.
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